Romping in the Bookish Dark

Once again while “hard at work” in the Library I came across a new-ish book of poetry that caught my eye, Mark Strand’s Man and Camel (2006). I was drawn to it both because it is a bright orange book (what could make a girl’s day brighter in the gloomy Ohio weather) and because I remembered liking some of Strand’s earlier work that I had been exposed to in high school and college, especially “Eating Poetry” and “The New Poetry Handbook.” Along with Man and Camel I also checked out Darker (1970) for comparison/refreshment and also my general distraction.

While I really liked several of the poems from Darker—especially “The Prediction,” “From a Litany” and “Elegy 1969”—the general tone of the collection seemed really dark and often helpless or at the mercy of fate, with death as a frequent element in the poems. I guess this shouldn’t have been too surprising given the title of the collection.

I spent more time with the new kid on the block, Man and Camel, however. While they are still similar to Strand’s earlier work as I experienced it in Darker, the tone has shifted and I got a very different feeling from reading this recent collection. The book is divided into three sections, and the final section is a single series of seven poems titled “Poem After the Last Seven Words.” This particular piece is interesting in that it takes on Biblical/scriptural elements quite directly, unlike other Strand poems that I have read.

For the most part, Strand’s poetry seemed to be largely narrative, and he often uses small stories in conjunction with reflections in the poems of this collection. Strand also uses a fair amount of repetition in these poems; one in particular struck me, as it repeated the same stanza twice in the format of a series.

“Elevator”
I.
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.”
II.
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.”

This duplication was intriguing to me; it feels as though the speaker has been standing at this elevator for a long time, answering this same question over and over in the same way. Both this repetition and the narrative style were things that I recognized from reading Strand’s earlier work, but there were some other characteristics to this collection that also stood out to me.

In the first section (called “one,” unassumingly enough), many poems, including the first few, “The King” and “Two Horses” among them, have dream-like qualities to them. The poems seem to be affected by age, that is, the speaker/Strand generally feels wise or at times world weary. One place where I noticed this was the appearance of death as a character in some of the poems. Unlike in earlier poems, death does not come from some dreamed up tragic fantasy situation, but it waits quietly for its natural place to intervene, as in “2002.” I also noticed themes relating to memory, regret, and the pull of fate. In part two, I noticed more attention to personal relationships, small portraits of people, a lot of moon imagery, and a feeling of greater distance from some of the subjects of the poems, as well as a greater distance from tragedy. For example, in “People Walking through the Night,” the subject (the people walking like refugees to sleep homeless in a park) are “they” unlike the “we” of earlier poems. Also, in “Marsyas,” “screams could be heard” of a “man tearing open his body,” but “nobody spoke” or took action, including the narrator.

I like this collection quite a bit; I found Strand’s poems to be both accessible and complex. While their narrative quality makes them easy to read, there is clearly something significant going on beyond the words on the page. In some ways, I felt that Strand’s earlier work (or at least the pieces that I read) resonated more with me, but perhaps I just need to spend a little more time with these new pieces.