Reasons for Moving, Darker and the Sargentville Not: Poems Book

Strand's poetry often plays with themes of passing: death, memory, seasons. It's dark, but not depressing. Rather, his words feel nostalgic. To my eye, images drive his poems - he juxtaposes them to create complex shifts of perspective and pairs that with well-composed observations or ruminations that might reveal to the reader the questions underlying his words.

In Reasons for Moving, his poems led me to existential questions of the self. How do we live in the world, with such an incomplete understanding of ourselves? On the one hand, Strand says

Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

But our existence is too complex for us to simply relax in the fact of duality. In living, we hurt others via various means. And so we must live with the guilt, and our futile attempts to rectify it:

My hand is dirty.
I must cut it off.
To wash it is pointless.

But the guilt of past evils is nothing compared to the death we and everyone we love must eventually face.

nobody wants
To leave, nobody wants to stay behind.

So what do we do as we live, and watch ourselves grow frail in the mirror, fearing the moment we disappear from the mirror, but also scared of living in the closing prison of old age?

In Darker, Strand more clearly grapples with the idea of his own death. He offers no solace to assuage any fears, and instead reflects on the strange paradox of living: of being caught between two equally incomprehensible states of non-existence:

We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

Okay. So maybe on second thought this is all kind of depressing, as is the thought that:

The graves are ready. The dead
shall inherit the dead.

But, on the other hand,

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you've never been before.

So, yeah, life is characterized by an unstoppable forward progression of the future being transformed into the past by the consciousness of ourselves in the present. But, on the upside, you only die once, and you have no way of knowing it's happening until the moment it does. So the rest of the time you're not dying, and can presumably get some enjoyment out of it.