Mark Strand

Some poets use dream-like imagery to evoke the reality of our lives.

Here is a poem by Mark Strand, (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014), Canadian born American poet, writer of short fiction, and translator whose poetry, noted for its surreal quality, explores the boundaries of the self and the external world.

Many of Strand's poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his Prince Edward Island childhood.

He was influenced stylistically by Latin American surrealism and European writers such as Franz Kafka, and his poetry, especially his earliest works, is replete with symbolic imagery and minimalist sensibility.

The Garden

It shines in the garden,
in the white foliage of the chestnut tree,  
in the brim of my father's hat
as he walks on the gravel.

In the garden suspended in time  
my mother sits in a redwood chair:  
light fills the sky,
the folds of her dress,
the roses tangled beside her.

And when my father bends
to whisper in her ear,
when they rise to leave
and the swallows dart
and the moon and stars
have drifted off together, it shines.

Even as you lean over this page,  
late and alone, it shines: even now  
in the moment before it disappears.

--Mark Strand, from Selected Poems