In the following essay, McDowell briefly explains how Strand's poetic study of the "Self dissembling" is rendered transparent amid the "literary pyrotechnics" or "opaque ruminations" of his contemporaries.

Through nine poetry collections, beginning in 1968, Mark Strand has gone about building his reputation with the cunning of a chameleon. Even with his early, more energetic poems in the volumes Moving and Darker, Strand had a tendency to become invisible between the dramatically different writing styles of a tight club of poet-friends: the literary pyrotechnics of Charles Simic and James Tate at one end, and the meditative, at times opaque ruminations of Charles Wright and the late William Matthews at the other. Perhaps not surprisingly, an at times unbearable anxiety permeates the poems:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

This vision of cynical...