I had read Strand’s poems and his wonderful book about Edward Hopper, so I was not surprised by this superb collection of prose poems which Louise Gluck had cited as the inspiration for her own prose poems during a lecture at Harvard last month.

Prose poems are works that sit at the intersection of poetry and prose.  They might just as easily be called ‘very short stories’ but their structure, enjambment, rhythm, and flow are what move them into the category of poems.

Strand who died at 80 in 2012 had a distinguished career.  A MacArthur fellow, winner of the Pulitzer, Wallace Stevens and Bollingen prizes, U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990 and a teacher at Columbia, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins among other leading universities, he has written with distinction about art as well as writing poetry.

This collection is full of both sadness and beauty.  There is an ambiguity, confusion, and uncertainty about time and place in many of the poems, and recurrent words like sorrow and melancholy add to the sense of isolation, powerlessness, desolation, despair, and longing.  The quotidian is often placed in juxtaposition to the unknowable land of the dead.  Many of the poems are in the form on one quite long sentence and many focus on nostalgia.  Here’s  the final poem in the book entitled ‘When I Turned a Hundred’:  “I wanted to go on an immense journey, to travel night and day/into the unknown until, forgetting my old self I came into/possession of a new self, one that I might have missed on my/previous travels.  But the first step was beyond me. I lay in bed,/ unable to move, pondering as one does at my age, the  ways of/melancholy—how it seeps into the spirit, how it disincarnates/the will, how it banishes the senses to the chill of twilight, how/even the best and worst intentions wither in its keep. I kept/staring at the ceiling then suddenly felt a blast of cold air, and/I was gone.”  Melancholy, longing, aging–it’s all here.

Here’s another wonderful one, ‘The Old Age of Nostalgia’:  “Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined/future, of being carried away in streams of promise by love or/a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced/that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was/charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and/one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-/loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the /high melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies/in the perfumed heat of a summer night.”

This is a good book for those of us entering the land of old age to read and savor.  They’re not candy-coated; they give a tough look at the future and a loving look back to a full life well-lived.