The Golden Ecco Anthology

by Mark Strand

The first in a new series of highly individualized collections of classic poetry, a literary anthology is compiled by the 1990 poet laureate of the United States.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Mark Strand was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. He was a professor of English at Columbia University and also taught at numerous other colleges and universities.

Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.

He is survived by a son, a daughter and a sister.

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the concept -- a poet sharing his favorite poems -- but was a little disappointed by Strand's choices, which resulted in a pretty standard "greats" selection. I'd read pretty much everything here before, and most of them weren't my favorites even within the corpus of the individual poets represented.

[Cheryl]

Ack. "The 20th Century." And, from the intro., nobody born after 1927. Oddly specific. But then the works aren't dated. For example, a poem that uses cigarette smoke as a metaphor means something different if it was written when only men smoked, or when everyone did, or, more recently, when it's recognized as a filthy habit. It really would help the reader to have that clue!

Strand's taste and mine don't mesh.

Still, I found a few that I could get something from. Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" which is also an ode to Whitman. Kenneth Koch's "One Train May Hide Another" which enumerates so many things that are in the shadows, or close behind, something similar, some of which may be revealed to you when you're not ready and thereby run you over.

Czeslaw Milosz' "Encounter" 'O my, love, where are they, where are they going... I ask not of sorrow, but in wonder.' Ogden Nash's "Very Like a Whale" which is a humorous plea to authors to use much less metaphor.

And Neruda's "Ode to a Seagull" which ends with the poet noting the garbage the gull eats, then exclaiming 'But in you it is transformed into clean wing, white geometry, the ecstatic line of flight.'

March 2025

[Vishvapani · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very different, personal and stimulating anthology of 20th century poetry. One poem per author makes this a guide to great poets, rather than poems. The usual suspects, known to English language poetry readers like me are here: Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Stevens, Williams etc; and also the most famous non-English language poets: Rilke, Neruda, Lorca et al.
The distinctive feature of the anthology is that Strand usually chooses lesser-known works; he has a good spread of mid-to-late 20th century American poets and, above all, he chooses poets I know only a little, only by reputation, or not at all - Pessoa, Amichi, Prevert, Szymbovska and many others. In other words, this is a very broad introduction to international 20th century poetry. One caveat: it covers poetry from Europe and the Americas, but not Africa or Asia.
The most prominent theme is reflection on death, ageing and impermanence, and the recurrent style is expressionist and imagistic. This, too, makes this a quite distinctive collection with pervasive sense of the sober and sombre. The quality of the poetry is uneven, but there is much to enjoy and it is hard to imagine the reader who won't also find much to discover.

[Deirdre · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was kind of meh. The author has a bad case of American exceptionalism - in the introduction, he basically says "I had to limit the number of American poems to 50% of the book because America has produced an astonishing number of excellent poets" and I thought, of course you think that; YOU'RE AMERICAN. There were several poems I really enjoyed, several that made me think, many that I thought were okay, some that were utterly incomprehensible to me. I did enjoy reading poems from different cultures on different events of the twentieth century.

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

It really should have been titled 100 Poems for Snobs. Most of the poems deal with death. And deal it to death in long, drawn-out mind-numbing ways.



Mark Strand said that the majority of the poets for this selection had to be born before 1927. I'm not good at math, but didn't the twentieth century go on for much longer than 1927?

As soon as I saw this book didn't have any e. e. cummings or Charles Bukowski, I should have just immediately given it back to the library. Very few of these poems moved me in any way except for yawning. The best poem is one by Odgen Nash called "Very Like a Whale" which made fun of poets and their use (and abuse) of metaphor and simile.

This is NOT the book to give someone to try to turn them on to poetry. Poetry critics would like it. However, a poetry critic has different criteria for a poem than the average reader. And the average reader is going to find this every off-putting.

Going to avoid anything edited by Mark Strand from now on. Might check out some 20th century Greek poets, though.

[Itachisan · Rating 1 out of 5]

didn't really like much of the poems, they were understandable but just not a great set of them. feel like there are better ones out there. its interesting to know these are from the 20th century tho, feels cool to be reading history. some were hard to understand, i would need to dedicate much time to deciphering them but most were an easy read.

[Hayley]

Poetry really isn't my thing, but at least I tried!

[Lillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a fan of the overall mood of this collection. Too much grief and inevitability of death for me.

[Wren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, why don't I read poetry every day? There were some lyric and provocative poems in this collection.

[Michael Broomfield]

Excellent selection

[Eshusdaughter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love poetry and have a certain weakness for anthologies. 100 Great Poems is a rather tall promise to make in the book's title and indeed the collection doesn't quite live up to that promise. One strength of the collection is that it contains a nice range of poetry from around the world and not just English poets. However, the poems selected are uneven, some quite good, some barely poetry at all and few that I would call great.

I think the editor was trying to find lesser known poems and poets, though some big names are included. There's a very, very heavy bias toward free-form poetry which might be an indication of poetry trends in the 20th century or the editor's taste - I'm not sure which.

I did find a few poems I really enjoyed in the anthology, and I hadn't read a single poem from this anthology before so it certainly wasn't just the same usual set.

My favorites included:
Things I didn't Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet
Encounter by Czeslaw Milosz
Very Like A Whale by Ogden Nash (for it's sheer cheekiness)
Ein Leben by Dan Pagis
Lullaby: Moonlight Lingers by Robert Penn Warren
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz by William Yeats

Six out of 100 isn't a terribly great record, which is why this anthology only gets three stars. I do, however, appreciate the diversity of the work.

[False · Rating 1 out of 5]

If a poetry anthology can be considered "politically correct," you've got your volume...and that is what was wrong with it, in my opinion. I went for this book because poet Mark Strand edited it. He died recently and I had gone to the library to get books of his poetry, which were not available. When I describe what I perceive as flaws in this book, it might not be the same for someone else. Strand would chose a poet from say...Russia, and then pick their one poem that runs five pages. This happens several times throughout the book. That whole "world voice" concept annoyed me. I felt he was trying to fulfill some showcase (assigned or chosen by himself) to bring a readership to Paraguay poets or Polish poets. But is the poetry "great?" No. The only thing that gave me any pleasure in this volume was re-reading Auden's poem on the death of Yeats. That was it. I'll go back to my original task. Securing volumes of Strand's poetry. This book is being reshelved.

[Ronald Wise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strand explains at the beginning that he did not try to select the "greatest" poems, nor to rank them, but was trying to gather an international respresentation of great poetry written in the 20th century. For each poet there was a biographic sketch in the "Biographies" section, and I found that by reading the poet's biography first, I was better able to appreciate the poetry, knowing something about the time and situation from which it arose. Strand seemed to have a taste similar to mine in that those he selected were not too abstract and tended to have concrete meaning with subtle symbolic overtones. This collection was added to my reading list after enjoying Strand's Blizzard of One in 2007.

[Manday · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think that it is really hard to make a good poetry anthology because poetry is so personal: a single poem will strike a chord with one person while it makes no sense to another. If this was the top 100 poems of the twentieth century, then the twentieth century left something to be desired in my opinion. However, because I found one or two complete gems in the anthology that I will read over and over, I gave it three stars.

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous!

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an odd collection that would be better titled: "100 20th Century Poems That I Really Liked About Facing the End of Your Life and Your Own Mortality, by Mark Strand." But maybe that title seemed too ungainly. This sort of collection can be brilliant or fall flat, depending on whether the reader shares the curator's taste. It would appear that I do not share Mr Strand's taste. Also, I'm too young to want to read 100 poems in a row about facing death.

Here is a sampling:


The City Limits
A. R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Mid-Way
Robert Desnos
translated from the French by William Kulik

There's a precise moment in time
When a man reaches the exact middle of his life.
A fraction of a second
A fleeting bit of time, quicker than a glance
Quicker than a fit of passion,
Quicker than light.
And a man is aware of this moment.

Long avenues with overhanging trees stretch out
Towards a tower where a lady sleeps
Whose beauty resists kisses, the seasons,
Like a star the wind, like a rock the waves.

A quivering boat sinks bawling.
A flag blows at the top of a tree.
A well-dressed woman with stockings fallen to her ankles
Appears on a street corner
Flushed, trembling,
Protecting with her hand an old-fashioned lamp which is smoking.

And in addition a drunken stevedore sings in the corner of a bridge
And in addition a mistress bites the lips of her lover
And in addition a rose petal falls on an empty bed
And in addition three clocks toll the same hour
At several minute intervals
And in addition a man passing in the street comes back
Because someone has called his name
But it is not he this woman is calling.
And in addition a public official in full dress
Cramped by his shirttail wedged
between his pants and his underwear
Dedicates an orphanage
And in addition a wonderful tomato falls from a truck speeding
Through the empty streets and rolls into the gutter
To be swept away later
And in addition a fire breaks out on the seventh floor of a building
And in addition a man hears a long forgotten song
which he will forget again
And in addition many other things
Many other things a man sees at the precise moment of the middle of his life
Many other things happen for a long time
in the briefest of brief instances on earth.
He ponders the mystery of that second, that fraction of a second,

But he says, "Let's get rid of dark thoughts"
And he gets rid of them.
And what could he say?
And what better could he do?

The Mad Pomegranate Tree
Odysseus Elytis
trans from Greek by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

In these all-white courtyards where the south wind blows
Whistling through vaulted arcades, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That leaps in the light, scattering its fruitful laughter
With windy wilfulness and whispering, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That quivers with foliage newly born at dawn
Raising high its colours in a shiver of triumph?

On plains where the naked girls awake,
When they harvest clover with their light brown arms
Roaming round the borders of their dreams–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree,
Unsuspecting, that puts the lights in their verdant baskets
That floods their names with the singing of birds–tell me
Is it the mad pomegranate tree that combats the cloudy skies of the world?

On the day that it adorns itself in jealousy with seven kinds of feathers,
Girding the eternal sun with a thousand blinding prisms
Tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That seizes on the run a horse's mane of a hundred lashes,
Never sad and never grumbling–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That cries out the new hope now dawning?
Tell me, is that the mad pomegranate tree waving in the distance,
Fluttering a handkerchief of leaves of cool flame,
A sea near birth with a thousand ships and more,
With waves that a thousand times and more set out and go
To unscented shores–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That creaks the rigging aloft in the lucid air?

High as can be, with the blue bunch of grapes that flares and celebrates
Arrogant, full of danger–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That shatters with light the demon's tempests in the middle of the world
That spreads far as can be the saffron ruffle of the day
Richly embroidered with scattered songs–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That hastily unfastens the silk apparel of day?

In petticoats of April first and cicadas of the feast of mid-August
Tell me, that which plays, that which rages, that which can entice
Shaking out of threats their evil black darkness
Spilling the sun's embrace intoxicating birds
Tell me, that which opens its wings on the breast of things
On the breast of our deepest dreams, is that the mad pomegranate tree?

An Old Man’s Winter Night
Robert Frost

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon,—such as she was,
So late-arising,—to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

The Little Box
Vasko Popa
Translated from Serbian by Charles Simic

The little box gets her first teeth
And her little length
Little width little emptiness
And all the rest she has

The little box continues growing
The cupboard that she was inside
Is now inside her

And she grows bigger bigger bigger
Now the room is inside her
And the house and the city and the earth
And the world she was in before

The little box remembers her childhood
And by a great longing
She becomes a little box again

Now in the little box
You have the whole world in miniature
You can easily put in a pocket
Easily steal it lose it

Take care of the little box


Rain
Edward Thomas

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

[Mustafiz Rahman]

good