Blizzard of One

Blizzard of One

Reviews of Blizzard of One

The New York Review of Books
"Mark Strand’s poems, like John Ashbery’s, can be read with great and almost dreamy pleasure…. " – John Bayley

Publishers Weekly
"“Since Yeats linked the ‘labor to be beautiful’ with the work of poetry, no poet has taken the link more to heart, or made handsomer, more stylish poems out of mirror-gazing, than former Poet Laureate Mark Strand … Whether in the charming monologues of ‘Five Dogs,’ the moving elegy ‘In Memory of Joseph Brodsky’ or the dream-memoir of his social circle, ‘The Delirium Waltz,’ Strand insists on the failure of poetry to preserve our reflections or to reanimate the ghosts of memory and loss. ‘Time slips by,’ he writes in ‘The Next Time,’ ‘our sorrows do not turn into poems, / And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled, / Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake, / And so many people we love have gone.’ The frank, elegiac brio and easy swing of lines like these have always distinguished Strand’s work, and they have never sounded more seductive … [T]his wonderful, varied new collection also shows a wit reminiscent of John Ashbery, private, hard to pin down, addicted to deferrals and dying falls. If there is something scandalous in Strand’s gorgeous, unabashed nostalgia or erotic melancholy, the scandal is how inescapable these modes remain, for us and for one of our most deeply enjoyable poets.”

Kirkus Reviews
"Former Poet Laureate, and a writer in a number of genres, this University of Chicago professor and much-honored poet has developed over the years an aesthetic much his own: the discursive, easy surfaces of his quiet, gently surreal poems accumulate into a complex metaphysic, a notion of time and space that permeates his every utterance, whether abstract or concrete. And his poems teem with simple actions and things: a dog barks, a snowflake melts, a ship sails. Strand can’t escape the momentary nature of experience: In the revelatory ‘Suite of Appearances’, he captures the fluidity of the self and reminds us that the history of ourselves leaves us cold, the past means nothing to our ever-present nowness. Risking tautology, Strand suggests that the self is both a disguise and not one, that all things are wronged / By representation, an idea that helps explain his precise diction, however wronged the object he hopes to describe. Poem after poem exults in the pleasures of daily life and the clarity of immediate experience, which makes his elegy to Joseph Brodsky an awkward remembrance, a measure of meanwhile."

Booklist
"Strand almost gives himself over to the sway of emotion, but remains reserved instead, polite, stoic, and elusive. This tension between abandon and control is expressed in the stylistic duality of his poems, which seem offhanded and proselike but which turn out to be breathtakingly lyric. He tells us that nothing we’re apt to strive for really matters, that everything just comes and goes, like wind, like breath, like love. What makes our spinning existences beautiful and precious are moments of repose, reflection, and wonder, like the scene in ‘A Piece of the Storm,’ the source of the collection’s title, in which a single snowflake makes its way into one room and the awareness of one person. Another title could serve as Strand’s credo, ‘Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life,’ a concept he further explores in ‘A Suite of Appearances’ by observing that ‘we clear a space for ourselves.’ This space, this refuge, is where poignancy and poetry live, and where Strand waxes and wanes like his totemic celestial body, the moon." – Donna Seaman