Sailing to Italy

When the poet Mark Strand was a child, his family was constantly in motion; he lived in Cleveland, Halifax, Montreal, New York, and Philadelphia, then Colombia, Mexico, Peru. “I moved around so much, and went to so many, “that I never found my own place.” Apparently, he never stopped reflecting on what that lack of a stable place meant, either—on how one’s identity can emerge from their environment, and how it can crumble without a consistent one. The task of poetry, he , is to examine “the edge of the self, the edge of the world—that shadow-land between self and reality.”