A celebration of the magnificent career of the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.

Beginning with Reasons for Moving, published in 1968, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing half century he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the stunning middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), he was already well known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: "And here the dark infinitve to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains into the hissing fields and silent towns…" In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the cheeky riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom, and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.