564
PARTISAN REVIEW
are boxed and labeled,
Illy
grandparents' among them,
my father's and my mother's ashes too.
A
tranquil
place, unfrightening, now that they rest there:
one comes to temlS there, almost, even with dread.
Nightfall on such a landscape casts long shadows indeed, shadows
which
Westward
renders beautifully.
*
*
*
It
would be hard to imagine a first-rate poet more different from Amy
Clampitt in temperament and practice than Mark Strand. Where she is
chatty, he has been laconic; where her language is lush, his is often lean;
where she finds endless correspondence, he tends
to
a withering skepti–
cism. Nonetheless,
Westward
might have served Strand as a title, too, for
his remarkable new verse is also concerned with the approach of old age
and with the landscape of the American West.
Mr. Strand's first five books of poetry cultivated an aesthetic of de–
liberate extremity. The lines were typically short, the volumes thin, the
hope afforded slim. Some ten years ago, the work ceased altogether, and
although Mr. Strand's silence was cause for regret, it was difficult for a
reader familiar with his work to feel much surprise. The poet had made
his mark, so to speak, by sawing off the psychological limb on which he
was sitting, by painting himself into a corner, by climbing into a coffin
and pulling down the lid.
The casket was a cocoon. Astonishingly, Mark Strand has found a
voice again, and it is a richly rewarding one. After a decade's morato–
rium during what might have been the prime of his career, he has now
returned
to
print with perhaps his most impressive work
to
date. Against
long odds, this book justifies his long absence, for Strand's poetry has
been transformed. His line is more fluid now, dignified and yet un–
strained. His diction is now informed by the greatest practitioners of
English verse - Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Stevens, Whitman - and many
of his new poems allude to these very authors, albeit obliquely and
unobtrusively. In the past, Strand's work has been minimalist, surreal,
quasi-theoretical. The new work is quasi-neoclassical.
It is possible that Mr. Strand's metamorphosis reflects not only the
poet's personal development, but a larger development in our culture as
well. Perhaps a latinate neoclassicism reminiscent of the eighteenth cen–
tury is becoming what this poet terms "the dominant idiom of the pe–
riod."
The Continllolls Life
docs in fact include a
cento Virgilianlls
(a late
classical form in which lines from Virgil's work arc reassembled into an
independent macaronic), but the prevailing spirit here is more Greek than
