Strand is both nervous and morbid, and a consideration of finality is his constant project…. In his first book, he is holding on for dear life. (pp. 508-09)

Sleeping with One Eye Open, published in 1964, is a book of forebodings and apprehensions, of mirrorings and divisions, the very titles of the poems articulating menace: "When the Vacation is Over for Good," "Something Is in the Air," "A Kind of Weakness," "A Reason for Moving," and of course the title poem, with its twitching echorhymes, its broken rhythms…. By writing an existing language as if it were his own invention, by confiding his endurance of dissolution to traditional discourse, Strand achieves, in these first poems of his, the spooky sense that he is being written by someone else, by something else, an energy his own only in that it moves through him, for it does not proceed from...