One of Mark Strand's collages Ah, translation - "the art of failure." Such a complicated matter, communicating between languages, cultures, ages... It's hard enough just translating between individuals. Mark Strand (1934-2014) was a translator on the side and a cursory websearch reveals that...
Mark Strand (1934-2014), who died last week, had received all the honors an American poet could dream of:(*) Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, Poet Laureate of the USA, MacArthur Fellow, Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, professorship at Columbia, etc., etc. More impo...
In the introductory statement the writers say this book is intended to answer those basic questions such as how does a sonnet work, what is a Sestina & what rules govern it, how many lines make up a Villanelle & what is it’s rhyme scheme? To do this they have traced the history of the various form...
I sweet story of the trials of having family with issues
I really liked the concept -- a poet sharing his favorite poems -- but was a little disappointed by Strand's choices, which resulted in a pretty standard "greats" selection. I'd read pretty much everyhting here before, and most of them weren't my favorites even within the corpus of the individual po...
I settled on 4 stars because I would give some of the poems 5 and others 3 or maybe 2. The section which opened the collection was amazing but I felt the works got steadily lower in quality as the book progressed.But it, y'know, won a Pulitzer, so whadda I know?Here's the poem from which the title c...
Well constructed but not to my taste.
I know Strand should get the five stars given his reputation, but he is someone I find at times enjoyable and at times annoying. His earlier and most recent poems strike me as the most natural, while his Pulitzer Prize collection (Blizzard of One) is too overwritten for my tastes.
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