STRAND, Mark | Four unpublished poems

Undated [circa 1970-1972].  Based on internal evidence, these four poems were probably composed when Strand was a professor at Brooklyn College in the early 1970s. In 2006, they were returned to Strand by his ex-wife Antonia Ratensky, who noted on the verso of the envelope: “You should probably have these…”  Strand’s early work is characterized by an intense concern for identity and anxiety about death. As David Kirby remarked in Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture, “Many poems in Strand’s first book [Sleeping with One Eye Open, 1964] show an uneasy preoccupation with self, and the vehicle used to express that preoccupation is often a dream state in which the speaker is divided between two worlds and can locate himself comfortably in neither.” Critics, however, discerned a shift with Strand’s third book [Darker, 1970]. Harold Bloom found that “the irreality of Borges, though still near, is receding in Darker, as Strand opens himself more to his own vision.”  That a