Mark Strand: Black Maps, The Garden, and Orpheus Alone

Mark Strand | photo credit: The Poetry Foundation

Mark Strand (1934 - 2014) was recognized as one of his generation's most important American poets, but he was also an accomplished prose writer, editor, and translator. Strand's writing style is marked by surreal imagery, precise language, and a recurring theme of negation and absence. His later collections, however, investigate ideas of the self with sharp and elegant wit. With a career that spanned five decades, numerous accolades from critics, and a loyal community of readers, Strand was named the US poet laureate in 1990 - the same year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection Blizzard of One. Today, as we approach another evening, I chose his poems "Black Maps", "The Garden", and "Orpheus Alone" as small, but masterful examples of his poetic work.

Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,

nor the applauding wind,

shall let you know

you have arrived,

not the sea that celebrates

only departures,

nor the mountains,

nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you

where you are.

Each moment is a place

you’ve never been.

You can walk

believing you cast

a light around you.

But how will you know?

The present is always dark.

Its maps are black,

rising from nothing,

describing,

in their slow ascent

into themselves,

their own voyage,

its emptiness,

the bleak, temperate

necessity of its completion.

As they rise into being

they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all

it is only to find,

too late, what you thought

were concerns of yours

do not exist.

Your house is not marked

on any of them,

nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,

nor are your enemies,

listing your faults.

Only you are there,

saying hello

to what you will be,

and the black grass

is holding up the black stars.

Copyright Credit: "Black Maps" by Mark Strand, Source: Poetry (1970)

The Garden

for Robert Penn Warren

It shines in the garden,

in the white foliage of the chestnut tree,   

in the brim of my father’s hat

as he walks on the gravel.

In the garden suspended in time   

my mother sits in a redwood chair:   

light fills the sky,

the folds of her dress,

the roses tangled beside her.

And when my father bends

to whisper in her ear,

when they rise to leave

and the swallows dart

and the moon and stars

have drifted off together, it shines.

Even as you lean over this page,   

late and alone, it shines: even now   

in the moment before it disappears.

Copyright Credit: Mark Strand, "The Garden" from Selected Poems.  Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand. 

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Orpheus Alone

It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk

On the shores of the darkest known river,

Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks

And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck;

Then to the great court with its marble yard

Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there

In the sunken silence of the place and speak

Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,

And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes,

Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread,

The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything

Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come,

As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream,

Against the water's will, where all the condemned

And pointless labor, stunned by his voice's cadence,

Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled

Furies, for the first time, would weep, and the soot-filled

Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride,

To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light.

As everyone knows, this was the first great poem,

Which was followed by days of sitting around

In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes

Closed, trying to will her return, but finding

Only himself, again and again, trapped

In the chill of his loss, and, finally,

Without a word, taking off to wander the hills

Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken

The image of love and put in its place the world

As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure

Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed,

And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place

Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept

The tender grass with the gowns of their shade,

And stones, weightless for once, came and set themselves there,

And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain

And aisles of corn, and slept. The voice of light

Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing

Rose from its depths and shone as it never had.

And that was the second great poem,

Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest

Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable,

Invisible source of all longing to be; it came

As things come that will perish, to be seen or heard

Awhile, like the coating of frost or the movement

Of wind, and then no more; it came in the middle of sleep

Like a door to the infinite, and, circled by flame,

Came again at the moment of waking, and, sometimes,

Remote and small, it came as a vision with trees

By a weaving stream, brushing the bank

With their violet shade, with somebody’s limbs

Scattered among the matted, mildewed leaves nearby,

With his severed head rolling under the waves,

Breaking the shifting columns of light into a swirl

Of slivers and flecks; it came in a language

Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark,

Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift,

So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope

Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.

Copyright Credit: Mark Strand, "Orpheus Alone" from The Continuous Life: Poems. Copyright © 1990 by Mark Strand.  

Source: The Continuous Life: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Mark Strand: Essential Books

Reasons for Moving, Darker & the Sargentville Not: Poems (paperback)

DESCRIPTION

"'Reasons for Moving' was Mark Strand's first book, and on its publication in 1968 Donald Justice called him "maybe the very best of the new poets." Darker followed, and Robert Penn Warren said, "the moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration." And Harold Bloom wrote, "these poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no confessional poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must he supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America." These key books in the career of a recent Poet Laureate of the United States are now reissued in one volume together with a private-press book of aphorisms dating from the same time. An essential book for a full understanding of one of our major poets. Color woodcut, Night Scene, by Neil Welliver. Courtesy of the artist."

Shop the book from Bookshop.

Blizzard of One: Pulitzer Prize Winner

DESCRIPTION 

"Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Blizzard of One is an extraordinary book--the summation of the work of a lifetime by one of our very few true masters of the art of poetry."

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Dark Harbor: A Poem

DESCRIPTION 

"Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Strand gives us a poem in forty-five sections that--despite its wide range and shifting mood and tone--is all of a piece. Here Strand speaks candidly to the reader, conversing, offering urban wit and surrealist digressions that draw on our innermost sensations and the outermost reaches of our reality:

Is what exists a souvenir of the time

Of the great nought and deep night without stars

The time before the universe began?

When we look at each other and see nothing

Is that not a confirmation that we are less

Than meets the eye and embody some of

The night of our origins?

A timeless pursuit of timeless questions, Dark Harbor centers on uncertainty and the known, family and isolation, the possible and the real. The poems in this book are easily recognizable as the world of one of our most interesting and influential poets."

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