Reading Mark Strand (PDF)

JAMES F. NICOSIA is a scholar and writer from northern New Jersey who has taught at several colleges and universities in the New York metropolitan area, USA.

'I commend Nicosia's Reading Mark Strand as a superb guide for all readers.' - Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University

'For forty years Mark Strand has consistently produced the best poetry in America, an oeuvre that looks at our dark world with terror and affection. In Nicosia, our best poet finds his best critic, one who trails his master as Dante follows Virgil into the underworld, where delights and terrors leap at them and disappear. Clear-eyed and nimble in his readings, Nicosia proves that 'learning how to read a Strand poem is learning how to read poetry.'' - David Kirby, Mark Strand and the Poet's Place in Contemporary Culture

'This is a comprehensive study of Strand's career, and Nicosia's analyses of individual poems and books are detailed and enlightening. Reading Mark Strand is original and should immediately become the standard critical work on Mark Strand. Nicosia pays close attention to all facets of the poetry itself, which is to say that his eye is continually on his actual subject and not on a self-devised theory that he is imposing upon the poetry of Strand.' - Peter Stitt, Editor, The Gettysburg Review

'Mark Strand has now found his ideal reader.Time and time again, in this work of deep, lyrical explication, James Nicosia traces the permeable borderline in Strand's difficult poetry between imagined and specific worlds; guides us through the master's metaphorical terrain; and then ever-so-gently releases usto explore that language on our own. I, for one, am very gratefulfor Nicosia's sensitive ability to write about a great modernist poet in a manner that reveals critical eruditionbut never insults my own intelligence.' - Neil Baldwin, Author of To All Gentleness: William Carlos Williams, The Doctor-Poet