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

The average rating for Reasons for Moving, Darker and the Sargentville Not: Poems based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-31 00:00:00 fabio stanzani This was the first book of poetry where I memorized an entire poem because it moved me so much. Here goes, from memory: In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole. The absolute simplicity of this poem and the careful diction Strand chooses displays a mastery of the English language that I think only poets really possess. If you read on, read more of his poems, you will see the theme of filling spaces and absences and voids. His words are so perfect. Every time. For a long time I wanted to tattoo the last stanza of this poem on my body because it was the first piece of language I really, truly fell head over heels in love with. Thank you Professor David Hamilton, University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, for introducing me to Mark Strand and for the subsequent love affair that followed. It has been one of the most significant and lasting relationships I've ever had.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-23 00:00:00 Aaron Reed 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.