Man and Camel

[Signature]

Reviewed by Richard Howard

As fastidious as he is famous (both qualifications remarkable for an American poet of this day and age), Strand allows this new book to show all the signs of pruning and purging. The sieve of art descends into the well of intimate contemplation and retrieves 23 closely reasoned poems remarkably consistent in the character of the Baffled Seer persisting in the double terror (or is it joy?) of all Strand's expression: evanescence of the longed-for Other, desolate wonder of the self.

It is no surprise, rather a sort of consolation, that except for the two poems commissioned to be read between movements of three Webern quartets and a Heyden quartet, most of these poems scrupulously record the actions and adventures of that wonderful "I," the character whose accents it has been Strand's genius to create in book after book: "I went to the middle of the room and called out," "I closed my eyes briefly," "I filled page after page," "I am not thinking of death," "...there would be a fire and I would walk into it," "I said that the dawning of the unknown was always before us," "I ran downstairs and called for my horse," "I'm going down," said I . And in the archetypal title poem: "I sat on the porch having a smoke" when the Other (here the Muse, the Mirage and what Strand calls "the ideal image for all uncommon couples") appears to the expectant smoker, "...just as they were vanishing/ the man and camel ceased to sing." The vision fades, the bereft self cannot be accommodated.

The two chamber music commissions are curiously Miltonic (impersonally sumptuous) in their chastened baroque tonalities, but however grandly invested in the mysteries of music ("the secret voice of being telling us/ that where we disappear is where we are") and of spiritual dedication ("to know/ at last that nothing is more real than nothing"), Strand more characteristically winnows a familiar comfort from "My Name," one of the loveliest and humblest poems he has yet written, from whose 12 lines I cite only the final few as a sort of hostage to greatness:

...and I heard

my name as if for the first time, heard it the way

one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off

as though it belonged not to me but to the silence

from which it had come and to which it would go.

(Sept.)

Richard Howard is a poet, critic and translator. He teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.