Mark Strand, prize-winning poet, dies at 80

NEW YORK - Mark Strand, 80, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate widely praised for his concentrated, elegiac verse, died Saturday at his daughter's New York home from liposarcoma.

A distinctive presence even at the end of his life, with his lean build, white hair, and round glasses, Mr. Strand received numerous honors, including the Pulitzer in 1999 for Blizzard of One and a National Book Award nomination this fall for Collected Poems. He was appointed poet laureate for 1990-91 but did not count his time in Washington among his great achievements.

"It's too close to the government. It's too official," he said in 2011.

He was born in Prince Edward Island in Canada, his mother a painter, his father a salesman whose work led to the family's living in many locales from Peru to Cleveland.

Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and several works of prose, Mr. Strand was haunted by absence, loss, and the passage of time from the beginning of his career. Some of his most famous lines appear in "Keeping Things Whole," a poem from Sleeping With One Eye Open, his 1964 debut:

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

He wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies, and translated the Italian poet Rafael Alberti.

He was a committed doubter, even about poetry. He went through occasional periods when he stopped writing verse.

"I don't make the same demands of prose as I do with poetry," he told the AP. ". . . You don't have to worry about the specific creativity of each word."