Shadow dancer

THE world abounds in mystery, this much we know. A man unfolding a blanket in a park. A child stepping off a curb. There are no beginnings or endings, just moments in between, and few poets capture these moments with greater elegance and precision than Mark Strand. One thinks of Rainer Maria Rilke, but it is too early for such a pronouncement; enough to say that time sweeps through the pages of Strand’s work, exposing a world both dark and promising.

“Man and Camel,” Strand’s first collection since “Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More” (2000), bears all the marks of his considerable achievement. The language is incantatory, the images dreamlike and the poems themselves often deceptively simple. “Elevator,” the most curious one, is three lines repeated once:

The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.

A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.

“I’m going down,” I said. “I won’t be going up.”

Up, down or out across the land, Strand takes several journeys in this book and encounters a world where men and camels sing, where Death rides in a limo, where wild dogs roam the streets. With his curiosity and humor, he’s a wonderfully congenial companion, a fearless guide who rarely equivocates, his voice and authority resonating well beyond the poem itself. “Sometimes there would be a fire,” he tells us, “and I would walk into it / and come out unharmed and continue on my way, / and for me it was just another thing to have done.”

If he once tried to keep things whole, as he suggested more than 40 years ago in “Keeping Things Whole” (“In a field / I am the absence / of field”), today we sense he is more comfortable with things falling apart:

We drifted downstream under a scattering of stars

and slept until the sun rose. When we got to the capital,

which lay in ruins, we built a large fire out of what chairs

and tables we could find. The heat was so fierce that birds

overhead caught fire and fell flaming to earth.

Throughout these pages, kingdoms are empty. Excesses of desire flare up. Roads lead to “the malodorous sea.” The world lies mostly in ruins, and as the R.E.M. song would have it, Strand feels fine.

What he discovers are singular images -- in one poem alone “groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white / of icebergs” -- more brilliant for their isolation. There’s an empiricism to his aesthetic that supports the most subjective leaps, and as strange and wonderful as they are, Strand delights in breaking the spell. “You ruined it,” the man and camel announce after the narrator observes their passage. “You ruined it forever.”

Ruin suits his purpose, for in loss there is longing, and in longing, room, as Auden writes, for the mortal, the guilty and the entirely beautiful soul. Existence becomes nothing more than a scrim on which we throw our memories and hopes. What we’ve lost is not missed until it’s gone -- a lesson poignantly told in the final sequence, seven poems based on Christ’s words from the cross.

Has the world ever been enough for us? In “Moon,” Strand invites us to “[o]pen the book of evening,” where the moon “lowers a path / to lead you away from what you have known / into those places where what you had wished for happens ... “ It’s the shadow world that exists alongside our everyday life that counts the most. Here lies the playground of the imagination. Here is the meaning of the blank page, of time on either side of the present, of the world beyond the horizon. Given such attention to ghosts, no wonder he set the final poems of this collection to music: the Webern Variations and Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ.”

And everything turns and turns

and the unknown turns into the song

that is the known, but what in turn

becomes of the song is not for us to say

As fulfillment proves elusive, Strand shifts to the problem of time: what we do with it and what it does to us. In a collection of occasional prose, “The Weather of Words,” he skirted the answers. “A is for absence,” he wrote in an opening abecedary. “B is for before, the acknowledged antecedent of now, the innocent shape of earlier, the vague and beautiful cousin of ‘when,’ the tragic mother of ‘will become,’ the suicide of ‘too late.’ ” And “P is for the passage of time. It is also for the secret passage that leads out of time into the stillness of what has not yet been named into being, the passage that leads to the birthplace of poems.”

Strand is indebted to Edward Hopper, whom he has written about extensively (the paintings “suggest the tone of what will follow just as they carry forward the tone of what preceded them”) and to Wordsworth. Unlike confessional poets, Wordsworth is not “merely a commentator,” interested in cataloging the world, but rather “the maker of the world he lives in.” As a result, Strand argues, the poetry is transcendent, “the process by which the poet puts himself into the universe until he becomes identified, finally, with the divine event.” No better gloss exists for Strand’s own aspirations. Elsewhere he has written: “In a poem, what is said is neither known or unknown. The world of things or the world of experience that may have given rise to the poem usually dissolves into the background ... as if the poem were replacing that world ... oddly asserting itself over the world.”

Strand’s world stands out in stark and generic terms -- a sea, a lawn, a white room, a city -- creating a background on which he limns the self. Occasionally he rivals Wordsworth’s great depictions of the passage of time:

Once when the lawn was a golden green

and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials

in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed

with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,

feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered

what I would become and where I would find myself ...

“My Name,” an extraordinary 12-line poem, opens with those words, and here Strand carefully blurs his identity with the world. Although it would be easy to assume that this connection comes in death, Strand connects to the “vast star-clustered sky,” the wind, the rain and silence.

In the final sequence, “Poem After the Seven Last Words,” Strand concentrates the breadth of this collection into seven short poems. “The story of the end,” he writes in the first, “ ... is a story that never ends.” Again like Auden (and Bruegel), he directs our attention offstage, writing not of Christ by name or Golgotha per se but of the associations rippling outward from the question whose answer never came: “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?” God’s silence gives Strand occasion to imagine answers (“To be thirsty.... To see one’s death. To see the darkening clouds.... “) and to drive toward the heart of this poetic sequence:

... To feel the sudden

presence of what, again and again, was not said.

To translate it and have it remain unsaid. To know

at last that nothing is more real than nothing.

But lest this be reason for despair, Strand offers a benediction, courting this nothing with the passion of a man whose writings have found answers and meaning in the slightest of circumstance.

... And beyond

as always, the sea of endless transparence, of utmost

calm, a place of constant beginning that has within it

what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand

has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart.

To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.

Ephemeral yet grounded, evanescent yet tangible, the poems in “Man and Camel” attempt to bridge the distance between what’s known and what’s unknown -- and address the mystery of the world -- and Strand, aware of the futility, remains playful in the conceit. If he is the poet who dares to walk into the fire, then we should consider ourselves lucky “... to have witnessed the lusters of heat, / the hushing effect of ashes, but even more to have known the fragrance / of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.” *