Mark Strand, Poet Laureate
Abstract
A small anthology of the work of Canadian writer, essayist, professor and poet Mark Strand (1934), who has received various awards for poetry; most notably, he was named Poet Laureate in 1990 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for Blizzard of One. As revealed by the poems selected by Paolo Kortazar, Strand's poetry breaks away from complexity and baroque excess, adopting a style in which there are no superfluous elements: he uses no more words than strictly necessary. Strand's poetry is to a large extent conscious and restrained; in it, the dialectic between presence and absence holds prominence, as does the feeling of impotence of the modern human being.
