‘A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire’ : DARK HARBOR, <i> By Mark Strand (Alfred A. Knopf: $19; 51 pp.)</i>

The last 30 years have been good ones for American poetry. Never before have so many poets of true stature and lasting importance written so powerfully and beautifully, some addressing the urgent issues of social reckoning that presently face us, others exploring those timeless questions concerning the individual self and soul.

Mark Strand’s stunning new book-length poem, “Dark Harbor,” comes to us as a timely reminder of the great power and solace of American poetry at its very best. Across the landscape of the imagination, Strand sets in motion a familiar pilgrim of the self and spirit, a seeker whose origins reside in Dante, Wordsworth and Leopardi.

In its 45 parts (and opening “Proem,” Dark Harbor quietly unfolds “like pages torn from a family album,” detailing the consolations of memory, the resiliencies of hope and the shifting of “a devotion / To the vagaries of desire.” Yet “Dark Harbor” is also a meditation on the speaker’s longing--for both the refuge of the past and the hoped for, if shadowy and death-darkened, harbor of the future. It is a book so deeply compelling, so heartbreaking and so elegantly written that it arrives as the fulfillment of Strand’s long and distinguished career.

One of our most recent Poet Laureates, a past MacArthur Fellow, and this year’s recipient of the prestigious Bollingen prize, Strand has long been recognized as one of our premier poets. His translations (of Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade) are essential contributions to Twentieth Century literature. Strand’s writings on realist painting, in “The Art of the Real,” as well as his superb book on painter William Bailey (to whom “Dark Harbor” is dedicated), are models of contemporary art criticism; they also reflect a source for Strand’s own painterly compositions.

Strand’s poetry has often been discussed as a hybrid of the acutely perceived “real,” as in the work of a poet like Elizabeth Bishop, and of the highly speculative and imaginative verbal pageants of a poet like Wallace Stevens. Strand himself has frequently acknowledged these poetic parents, yet never has their marriage seemed more apt than under the shaded arbors of “Dark Harbor.” The deceptive simplicity of Strand’s lines and the exquisite eloquence of his cadences reflect an ease of intelligence unequaled since Stevens. In fact, in its abstract lyricism, “Dark Harbor’s” most profound echoes seem to arise out of Stevens’ gorgeous late poems, notably “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.”

Many readers of Strand’s early poetry (his “Selected Poems” appeared in 1990) are accustomed to work in which the self is predicated upon a renunciation of the world, or upon a recognition of the insubstantiality of all things. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the self is barely held by the sieve of these poems. Yet Strand’s early work always desires to invent its own transparency, so that a more complex psychological life might be revealed.

These attempts to pare down the self to its own essentiality gave way somewhat in Strand’s most recent collection, “The Continuous Life” (1990). Where once the quotidian was banished, the elements of daily life there found celebration. Now, in “Dark Harbor,” we find ourselves accompanying the poet along the course--the journey--of an artistic life. From the safety of home we begin what the speaker ironically calls “passages of greater and lesser worth,” with the triple pun on “passages” of time, travel and poetry.

There is something resolutely personal and intimate illuminating the world of “Dark Harbor.” Out of the origins of childhood, Strand recognizes, we begin that simple passage toward oblivion. Constantly, Strand seeks to “embrace those origins as you would yourself,” hoping to counterbalance “the weight of the future. . . .” This is, after all, a poem of absolute departure, one which set us sailing toward a shore obscured by the indeterminate future. And, as in many great poems of departure, we find:

...if anyone suffers, wings can be had For a song or by trading arms,

that the rules On earth still hold for those

about to depart, That it is best to be ready, for the ash Of the body is worthless and goes

only so far.

At times, the delicately ephemeral and tabular quality of the writing seems to lift us into the realm of dream. In Strand’s poetry, dream and memory often become the vehicles by which one traverses the harsh terrain of daily life. Like the work of the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, there is also a playful, even comic spirit stitched through the lines. The elegiac impulses of “Dark Harbor” don’t preclude this lighter touch; most often, we find a dry and sardonic wit, though occasionally the humor turns broad, as in this passage when:

A man who’d been cramped

and bloated for weeks Blew wide open. His wife,

whose back was to him, Didn’t turn around right away

to give everything-- The cheese and soggy bread--

a chance to see it. Early in “Dark Harbor,” the speaker asks every poets’ question:

How do you turn pain Into its own memorial, how do you

write it down, Turning it into itself as witnessed Through pleasure, so it can

be known, even loved. . . .

This desire to understand the transformation of experience into poetry, this yearning to experience that alchemical, Orphic equation stands at the heart of this book.

The poet’s presiding fear, therefore, resonating throughout the final passages of “Dark Harbor,” is that, like one’s flesh, that other body--of poetry--might also disappear. Near the conclusion of the poem the speaker asks:

And after I go, as I must,

And come back through the hour -

glass, will I have proved

That I live against time,

that the silk of the songs

I sang is not lost? Or will I

have proved that whatever I love

Is unbearable, that the views of the

Lethe will never

Improve, that whatever I sing

is blank?

As the speaker’s profound sense of mortality rises, he fears the “truth is / Soon the song deserts its maker.” He imagines that the “measures of nothingness / Are few. The Beyond is merely beyond, / A melancholy place of failed and fallen stars.” Yet, in the book’s final section, a desolate version of the afterlife that seems a playful combination of Rilke’s angelic order and the raw coast of western Ireland, the speaker takes his place in a group--of other departed poets, it seems--gathered around a fire. We’re left with this image of arrival and consolation as he looks into the distance, toward the hills:

Above the river, where the golden

lights of sunset And sunrise are one and the same,

and saw something flying Back and forth, fluttering its wings.

Then it stopped in mid-air. It was an angel, one of the good ones,

about to sing.