SOURCE: Berger, Charles. “Reading as Poets Read: Following Mark Strand.” Philosophy and Literature 20, no. 1 (April 1996): 177-88.

In the following essay, Berger presents a detailed explication of three poems by Strand: “Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life,” “The Next Time,” and “Great Dog Poem No. 2.”

For close to a decade now, in the third or fourth phase of his career, Mark Strand has been giving us poem after poem marked by his familiar voice—luminous, deceptively casual, witty, allusive—as he builds up a body of work that thinks and sings ever more deeply about the poet's unavoidable life of allegory. This growing summa of poetic knowledge and readerly pleasure demands, as the best lyric poetry always does, that readers give themselves over to the rigorous joys of figurative reading, figurative argument. You stare and stare at the poem until something flashes—linkages, interpretive genealogies, a conjunction of words...