Dear Mr. Strand,

I'm late for dinner. I'm sorry, not because I have done wrong, but for my own sake. My ignorance of your cooking has kept me.

I've just finished New Selected Poems. I saw the handwritten drafts that are the background of this book and knew that I would want to write to you. I may be wrong, but I feel that a person's handwriting is a kind of confession, and your handwriting told me I could trust you.

Reading poetry intimidates me. I don't know why, but it does. Being able to trust a poet, or maybe what's more accurate, feel as if there is flesh behind the ink on the page in the book I am holding, makes poetry more like a conversation, which is what poetry should be, I think, putting bodies on either side of a page.

I know that expressing my amazement at your work is a bit like describing a band I've just discovered to my father. "They're simple, really," I say, "but you won't believe their magnetism. Apparently, they were fairly popular in the day. Have you heard of them - The Beatles, I mean?"

Even so, I want to say thank you for New Selected Poems, because new to me is still a kind of new, and maybe there are others out there like me, people who hadn't yet met your words and for whom this book was an illumination.

Can I quote you? Because "[t]he carnation in my buttonhole / precedes me like a small / continuous explosion" from "The Man in the Mirror" deserves to be passed around. Your imagery is visceral, exacting to the point that I inhabit it and then begin to wonder if you are asking all the questions I haven't realized I was asking.

So many moons and so many stars! If they were my fledgling poems I would tell me to use some other celestial reference, but I won't tell you, because I never get tired of your moons. Clichés are cliché because so many say them that they get tired and end up meaning nothing to nobody, but when you say moon, my lungs expand in a new direction and I remember why the moon is important.

I recognize your impulse to watch/live/be the physical world. I recognize the speaker in "The House in French Village," who looks at the view from his front porch:

and all we could see were sheets of cold rain sweeping this way and that, riffling the sea's coat of deep green and the wind beating the field flat sending up to the porch gusts of salt spray that carried the odor of fish and the rot so it seemed of the whole bay while we kept watch.

In "A Morning," the "it," the "luminous room, a light-filled grave" you describe, and the solitary journey that took you to the place where you "saw for the first time / the one clear place given to us when we are alone" feels like the discovery of nirvana as much as it reminds me of my mortality. The reminder is ecstatic, like sinking under the surface of the ocean and listening to my ears echo against so many millions of gallons of water. I don't want to come up for air, but part of the sanctity of that moment is its impossibility, its inevitable end. For me, your poetry is a way to remember that ecstasy even with my head above water.

With many thanks,

Claire Stephens