
In his Prize-winning collection, Strand's poems are filled with portent and authority, but many are also, unexpectedly, even miraculously, funny. A celebrity poet pulls up in a limousine to cheers of adulation; a lone dog contemplates philosophy. The poem The Delirium Waltz is...

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...