Common Themes in the Poetry of Mark Strand

Mark Strand has a common theme throughout all of his short poems found in Blizzard of One. I found Nature as the common motif. Many of the poems are interesting in this short work by Strand, and many poems stood out.

"Untitled," the first poem in the novel uses first person and third person to convey the heartache found with love. "The adorable one..."(Strand 3), is relative to explaining a youngness in age. Which helped me decipher the poem being about young love or puppy love. The poet Strand uses Flashback to build images of the setting. Strand uses Alliteration, "Lavender light,"(3), to describe the scene. I got the sense the young couple were ending their relationship in a dusk setting.

By also using enjambment sentencing, Strand conveys the emotions of the characters. Run-On sentences with capitalization, punctuates the feeling of a sense of hopelessness and finality.

In the end I questioned the ending. The young female in the relationship ended the love affair. Recently, I read the novel The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks. I compared and contrasted the similarities between the young lovers in Sparks book and Stand's poem. In the novel The Notebook, a young man, handsome, and caring falls in love with a young woman from another social class. In the end, the young woman chooses love over monetary stability.

This poem, "Untitled," mirrored The Notebook, which made me wonder if maybe the young women in Strand's poem had been in a similar situation with her own young lover. And if maybe she had chosen monetary stability over her lover.