The deep underlying motive of Mark Strand's poetry is the solipsism or loneliness of the individual imagination, isolated from the world of memory, objects, the body, other people. This seems to me to be true even though his most poignant poems include "The Marriage," which fulfills its title, and "The Prediction," which in a courtly, painful way extends itself toward the young womanhood of someone long dead.

And though The Late Hour … ends with a naming of people dear to the poet, they are hailed, characteristically, across a darkness that is not only intervening, but an infusing, negative quality…. [This negative quality, found in "Night Pieces, II,"] is followed by the volume's conclusion, a gratitude that the world returns ("we come back whole / to suck the sweet marrow of day"); such gratitude implies that the world's presence is a consummation, and not a condition of life.

Samuel Beckett's...