Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand is “a poet of mood, of integrated fragments, of twilit landscape, and of longing,” praised Henri Cole in Poetry.
Strand was born on Prince Edward Island in 1934 and spent his childhood in cities across Canada, the United States, and South America as his salesman father followed work. “I seem to be a tourist on planet Earth,” he has said. Indeed, feelings of displacement, of floating, of existential travel pervade Strand’s work. In twelve collections of poetry, including Blizzard of One (1999) and, most recently Man and Camel (2006), he has explored age-old questions of selfhood and mortality through precise language and surreal imagery.
Strand also writes prose, children’s books, and art criticism (he is particularly interested in Edward Hopper); translates poetry; and teaches at Columbia University. His work has garnered him nearly every award, grant, or prize possible in poetry. Suffice it to say that mail emblazoned with “Rockefeller,” “Fulbright,” “Guggenheim,” “MacArthur,” and “Bollingen” has arrived at his New York City residence. In 1990, he was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States.