[Mark Strand's] Darker seems to me a much stronger work than his Reasons for Moving (1968) or Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964). The strength is largely the coherence of his figures. As the title claims, Mr. Strand is going deeper into the darkness, taking greater risks, but he is not foolhardy, he goes in well accoutered. His element is time; he has trained himself to walk in that darkness by practicing the tenses, seeing present things in the oblique light of the future, confronting present and past. He is very good on memory, but even better on prediction and the failures of prediction: best of all on situations in which it is possible to say, "the future is not what it used to be."

Many of his poems sound as if they were written on the principle: take a cliché and wring its neck. For instance, that time changes...