Book: Sleeping with One Eye Open

Overview
Mark Strand's debut collection "Sleeping with One Eye Open" (1964) announces a voice that is both spare and strange. The poems operate at the intersection of the everyday and the surreal: domestic details and ordinary landscapes are fractured by unexpected images and logic that feel dream-born. The result is a body of work that reads like a series of quiet hauntings, each poem offering a small, concentrated world in which absence and presence sit uneasily together.
The collection moves with deliberate restraint. Language is pared down, sentences often short and declarative, yet each line tracks a subtle shift in mood or perspective. Rather than theatrical gestures, Strand relies on accumulations of light and silence, making emptiness into an aesthetic and ethical condition that invites slow, repeated readings.

Themes
Isolation and estrangement are the twin engines of the book. Speakers inhabit rooms, streets, and relationships that carry the distance of a vast interior life; interactions tend to be flat and ritualized, revealing how people live alongside one another without fully inhabiting the same world. Romantic and familial ties appear, but they rarely provide full solace; instead relationships become mirrors that reflect a deeper, often inarticulate solitude.
Mortality and time thread through the poems as quiet pressures rather than headline claims. Objects, gestures, and small failures, missed appointments, broken things, fading light, function as reminders of finitude. At the same time the collection refuses bleakness for its own sake: moments of irony, faint tenderness, and uncanny humor surface, suggesting that awareness of emptiness can generate compassion as well as anxiety.

Imagery and Style
Surrealistic imagery is central, but Strand's surrealism is less flamboyant than it is insistent. Strange juxtapositions are presented without much rhetorical flourish, which makes them feel inevitable rather than contrived. A domestic table can become an altar; a figure walking down a street can shift into a memory or an absence. These metamorphoses are rendered with clean, concrete diction that heightens their strangeness by refusing to sentimentalize it.
Formally, the poems favor short lines and precise syntax. There is a minimalist discipline at work: adjectives are chosen economically, verbs carry quiet weight, and white space functions like a held breath. The combination of plain speech and unexpected image produces a tone of cool wonder, where the ordinary world continually threatens to yield a different grammar of meaning.

Voice and Tone
Strand's speakers are often detached observers, registering the world with a kind of wary attention. That detachment does not imply indifference; rather it is the stance of someone trying to measure the small, stubborn facts of being alive. The voice can be elegiac without melodrama, ironic without cynicism, and surprisingly tender beneath a surface of restraint.
There is also a persistent dream logic to the tone: statements slide into surreal conclusions, and the reader is led to accept minor impossibilities as part of a psychological landscape. This tonal blend, calm, haunted, occasionally wry, gives the poems their haunting memorability.

Legacy and Influence
"Sleeping with One Eye Open" introduced a poet who would become one of the most respected voices of his generation. The collection set stylistic and thematic precedents that Strand would continue to refine across a long career: the fusion of plainspoken diction with dreamlike invention, the ethical attention to solitude, and the belief that compression and silence can carry moral weight. While rooted in the mid-20th-century sensibility, these poems feel curiously modern in their economies of language and their receptivity to the strange within the everyday.
Read today, the collection still rewards close attention. Its quiet, exacting surfaces disclose new resonances with each encounter, and its insistence on the small, uncanny details of life keeps it both accessible and quietly discomfiting.