I had the curious feeling after reading Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970) that Strand's best poems were atypical. In Reasons for Moving I was drawn to the subversive energy of "Eating Poetry"; the breathless dramatization of a dream world in "The Accident"; the ironic detachment of "The Marriage"; the surreal immediacy of "The Last Bus"; the nameless anxiety issuing in frenetic action and the sudden, unexpected identity of nervous insider with ravaged outcast in "The Tunnel"; the successful experiment with a longer-than-lyric poem in "The Man in the Mirror." In Darker I was moved by Strand's attempt in "The Remains" to define himself, even negatively, in terms of his wife and parents; his studious avoidance of the first-person pronoun while imagining another—a woman—imagining a future in her absence in "The Prediction"; the grotesquely priapic onslaught of "Courtship"; or in "The Way It Is" (another longer-than-usual poem...