[Mark Strand's Darker] represents a remarkable development in depth of insight and poetic control. The two poems headed "From a Litany" show the degree of tension in this book, for the first is a litany of praise … and the second is a somber chant of disgust for life…. But [the style of "From a Litany"], reminiscent of Kit Smart and Whitman, is not characteristic of the volume, which is mainly composed in compact stanzas, usually quatrains, and very often set forth in poems of only three or four stanzas. Inevitably these shorter poems evoke the shades of Emily Dickinson or Thomas Hardy; and the comparison will hold, for Strand's rigorous technique is designed to control the same dark feelings of faithlessness and emptiness and bleakness that lie at the center of Dickinson's and Hardy's universe, the sense that there is no one there to listen…. [These shorter poems...