Mark Strand

Biography

Mark Strand (1934 – 2014) served as the US poet laureate from 1990 to 1991. Strand was well known for translation, art criticism, and poetry. He published numerous poetry collections, including Collected Poems (Knopf, 2014), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Almost Invisible (Knopf, 2007); and Blizzard of One (Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the NEA, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

See Work

POETRY / Spring 1978

Poems of Air

By Mark Strand

The poems of air are slowly dying;
too light for the page, too faint, too far away,
the ones we’ve called The Moon, The Stars, The Sun,
sink into the sea or slide behind the cooling trees
at the field’s edge. The grave of light is...

POETRY / Winter 1978

Night Piece

By Mark Strand

It is night. I feel it is night
not because darkness has fallen
(what do I care about darkness falling)
but because down in myself the shouting
has stopped, has given up.