Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I met Mark Strand everywhere this weekend. In The New Yorker , Dan Chiasson reviewed his New Selected Poems , along with Hass's Time and Materials . I heard him read Friday evening at Cornelia Street Cafe. On the move, and on my back, I spent yesterday and today reading his new book. Now I meet him in my memory, remembering the Strand poem engraved in dark stone of the fountain in the relatively new Battery Park Condominiums Complex. What do I remember after reading "New Selected Poems"? Chiefly the moving and funny sequence of poems from Dark Harbor . "XXXV" begins with the startling, and the deliberate disavowal of the drama of the startling. The disavowal is in the service of something deeper, more human, more poignant. The sickness of angels is nothing new. I have seen them crawling like bees, Flightless, chewing their tongues, not singing. Down by the bus terminal, hanging out, Showing their legs, hiding their wings, Carrying on for their brief term on eart...

Mark Strand was the featured reader at Cornelia Street Cafe last night. His reading was unhurried, unfussy and unshowy, relying on the precision and valence of words ordered well. Reading in a basement, he chose poems that resonated in the subterranean. They were funny, yearning, compassionate. They were also highly conscious of traditional forms. He read a ballad about a couple who met in an underground train station. He read "Black Sea" when someone in the audience shouted out the request. The poem blew the top off my head. Looking at it on the page, now, I just realized that it is a Shakespearian sonnet. Black Sea One clear night while the others slept, I climbed the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it, the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long, whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach of a distant light, and I imagi...