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This eleventh collection from Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Strand is a toast to transience and abiding beauty. Opening with a group of haunting fables, Man and Camel is populated by fanciful characters, from an anti-heroic and emblematic King to the poet's own alter ego, who recounts the fetching mystery of the title poem: "I sat on the porch having a smoke / when out of the blue a man and a camel / happened by."

The poet's adventures carry him across physical and spiritual geographies as fancy gives way to powerful scenes of loss. In "The Mirror," a beautiful woman stares past him

into a place I could only imagine...
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

Man and Camel includes a set of meditations crafted around the Seven Last Words of Christ, in which Strand finds resonance in the bedrock of Christ's language, words which have goverened generations of thought and belief. For Strand, the discovery of meaning in the sound of language itself is an act of faith that enlightens us and carries us beyond the bounds of the rational.

Hardcover. 2006.
Autographed by Mark Strand.