Collected Poems

Collected Poems

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award <br><br>Gathered here is a half century€s magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.<br><br>Beginning with the limited-edition volume <i>Sleeping with One Eye Open</i>, published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as<i> The Continuous Life</i> (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: €œAnd here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns.€ In his later work, from <i>Blizzard of One </i>(1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent <i>Almost Invisible</i> (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.