Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Strand gives us a poem in forty-five sections that—despite its wide range and shifting mood and tone—is all of a piece. Here Strand speaks candidly to the reader, conversing, offering urban wit and surrealist digressions that draw on our innermost sensations and the outermost reaches of our reality:
Is what exists a souvenir of the time
Of the great nought and deep night without stars
The time before the universe began?
When we look at each other and see nothing
Is that not a confirmation that we are less
Than meets the eye and embody some of
The night of our origins?
A timeless pursuit of timeless questions,
Dark Harbor
centers on uncertainty and the known, family and isolation, the possible and the real. The poems in this book are easily recognizable as the world of one of our most interesting and influential poets.