SOURCE: Howard, Richard. Review of The Story of Our Lives, by Mark Strand. Ohio Review 15, no. 3 (spring 1974): 104-07.

In the following review, Howard praises the clarity of Strand's focus in his poetry and contends that The Story of Our Lives is Strand's best collection.

His fourth and finest book—finest because the focus is so clear, the resonance of an already “placed” voice so unmixed and yet so unforced—begins with a sustained lament for the poet's father, for his father's life rather than for his death. Death is not to be mourned in Strand's thematics, of course, it is only to be identified:

                                                  to lose again and again is to have more and more to lose, and losing is having … 

One more celebration of an empty place, this elegy is an emblematic trajectory, a six-poem acknowledgment of the necessity to put off knowledge, to deny, to refuse...