Man and Camel | Mark Strand (Knopf)
Not that that’s so surprising. Strand–a Pulitzer winner and onetime U.S. poet laureate–is a self-conscious postmodernist. In the context of poetry that means he eschews the strident bombast of the beats, instead choosing a self-referential aridity. A perfect example is the volume’s nadir, the presumptuous “Moon.” This is a less skillful retread of one of Strand’s more anthologized efforts, “The Prediction,” and like the earlier poem, “Moon” is obsessively about itself.
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“Open the book of evening to the page / where the moon, always the moon appears,” Strand begins, and goes on to praise the beauty of the moon–and, by implication, of this poem itself. At the end Strand tells us to “close the book, still feeling what it was like / To dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.” In other words, dear reader, please stand in wordless awe before the wonder that is this poem. It’s like the marketing blurbs have somehow crawled off the back cover and infested the text.
But though people may be indifferent to poets, they still love verse. Any day you can hear kids reciting hip-hop lyrics from memory. And, of course, there are children’s books. One of the most popular and inventive creators of these is Sandra Boynton, who’s penned more than 40 and this past month released her latest, the board book Your Personal Penguin.
