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Blizzard of One: Poems
by Mark Strand
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Knopf (1998-05-05)
ISBN: 0375401393
EAN: 9780375401398
Dewy Decimal #: 811.54
Hardcover: 72 pages
Edition: 1
Release Date: 1998-05-05
SKU: 070625004
Condition: Collectible: Very Go
Comments: This copyright 1998, inscribed signed copy is in excellent condition. No markings, highlights, underlining, tears. Tight text and spine. No dust jacket. Soft cover has very light shelf/edge wear. Great reading at an affordable price. (G 17)
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
Mark Strand's Blizzard of One features a collage of his own devising on the cover: an expanse of red and blue geometric planes, broken up by the appearance of an ice floe on the imaginary horizon. The image invites the viewer to fill up the surrounding emptiness. So too does the white space surrounding Strand's taut, spare, metaphysical verse. The quest for the single lyric's integrity and wholeness sets Strand apart from those poets for whom the provisional is everything. And this is an artist who never shies away from the absolute: indeed, he manages to make each poem in the book recapitulate the beginning and the end. There is a terrible atmosphere of finality and doom to these poems. In two splendid villanelles, for example, Strand pays homage to De Chirico, and the tension of lines like these brings with it a strange shiver of pleasure: Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
One tries to brush it off. It only grows.
Something about the silence of the square.
Something is wrong; something about the air,
Its color; about the light, the way it glows.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
Strand continues to acknowledge his debt to Wallace Stevens, while taking the impulse to a further level of abstraction: "Even now we seem to be waiting / For something whose appearance would be its vanishing." Yet he can also deal lightly and self-mockingly with serious concerns: "Now that the great dog I worshipped for years / Has become none other than myself, I can look within / And bark, and I can look at the mountains down the street / And bark at them as well...." No poet has been able to make more out of a minimalist aesthetic than Mark Strand. He strives for elegance and masterful brevity, and whether he's working his ominous or light-fingered register, his formalism is never precious, always an agent of necessity. --Mark Rudman
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Product 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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Customer Reviews
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Graceful, Gorgeous Work
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-02-20
Mark Strand works at a level that is so far above my abilities that I find myself chuckling and shaking my head at his books. As I read this, my wife kept asking if it was funny stuff. I said, no, that it was just so good it was continually surprising. Reading Strand is like walking alone though the greatest museum, where each painting is a masterpiece and speaks directly to you. I can't begin to say how good this book is.
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Simply Astounding
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-02-18
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Mark Strand is an incredibly talented poet--but, then, everyone already knows that...so let's focus on what people don't know--why they should by this book! This is one of the greatest small collections of poetry I have ever seen...We used it for my EH-306 Lyric Poetry class at Stetson University, and today, as I write this, Mark Strand is giving a reading/Q&A session here...If you don't believe me, do a "look-inside" on the book...you can read one or two of his poems and judge for yourself...hope this helps.
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Slim Volume, Short Phrases, Solid Poetry
Rating  (4)
Date: 2004-10-18
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
As often happens, I am lead to a book of poetry by reading a poem in a magazine and then seeking out the volume in which the poem appears. Often, it takes a few years before the book appears but usually it is worth it. Certainly that is the case with this collection of poems by Mark Strand.
The poem that drew me to Strand is "A Piece of the Storm." This poem is eleven brilliant lines that, in its imagery and complexity, has incredible emotional impact. It is certainly one of the best poems I've read in the past ten years. I'm tempted to quote it in its entirely (as I do to friends) in this review but I'll resist the temptation. Consider just this one line that gives title to the book: "A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room..." Notice the juxtaposition of descriptions of the snowflake. It is a blizzard, yet it is weightless. And it is the heavy force of this snowflake that leads the poem to its emotional epiphany. Needless to say, I will be turning the lines of the poem over in my mind for years to come.
As for the rest of this slim volume, if it doesn't quite live up to the promise of "A Piece of the Storm," there is much here that is worthwhile, particularly in the first half. "Untitled," "The Next Time," "The Night, The Porch," and "Some Last Words" are all excellent. The last two sections I found much less interesting though the second part of "What It Was" is quite powerful.
There are still those of us that believe in the power of poetry and believe there are still poets writing today worth reading. Mark Strand is proof of that.
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Quite, quite fine
Rating (4)
Date: 2003-07-03
0 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Is Strand John Donne? Hardly. Is he Yeats? Alas, no. But he may be among the very best of living poets, and this has several poems worth re-reading. I look for more from him of the caliber of "Keeping Things Whole." Until then, this volume is a good consolation.
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Dally the doom
Rating (4)
Date: 2001-05-03
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
While Mark Strand is not my favorite poet, I can still see and appreciate his brilliance. The only thing about his poetry of which I can truly complain is that it does not make good reading while you are depressed. That said, if one reads and re-reads "Blizzard of One" in a more intellectual Stevens-esque mood, one must admit themself to be in the presence of a master. Strand's lines are inventive and extremely well-honed, and his work suggests the depth and complexity of a poet of the highest, or almost-highest, caliber.Not too many people notice Strand's sense of humor, though. He read at my college in the fall of 1999 on the same night as (are you ready for this?) Donald Justice and Derek Walcott. Reading last, after Walcott read a selection from the manuscript of "Tiepolo's Hound," Strand got up and started making everyone laugh with what he read. Most of what he read was from "Blizzard of One," too. "Some Last Words" is probably the poem in this collection which best embodies that side of Strand. I reccomend this book for anyone who loves poetry. Just be in the right mood when you read it.
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