The Story of Our Lives: With the Monument and the Late Hour

Mark Strand is the author of nine books of poems, including Blizzard of One, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990, and currently teaches at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicago.

This book brings together for the first time three out-of-print works written in the 1970’s by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet---an essential for long-time and first-time readers alike.

It opens with the haunting ＂Elegy for My Father＂ from The Story of Our Lives (1973)---a powerful evocation of the emptiness, abandonment, and questioning that the dead leave to the living---and moves on to such poems as ＂Inside the Story,＂ which illuminates the ＂insides＂ of love---the unspoken conversations between lovers, the arbitrary rules with which we guide our relationships.

The witty prose pieces from The Monument (1978) act as a reflective pause between the two poetry collections, commenting upon the immortality of poetry and the harmonious connection between the writer and his future readers. And, flowing seamlessly from these meditations, The Late Hour (1978) exemplifies the timeless power of lyric poetry, bringing us eloquent, lilting poems about the irretrievable past, the redemptive power of love, and the mysterious cycles of human existence:

＂Again the late hour, the moon and stars,
the wounds of night that heal without sound,
again the luminous wind of morning that comes before the sun...＂