29 Nov. The St Stephen’s Cultural Center and the arts department present a bi-lingual reading from the collection by Mark Strand, Edward Hopper: Un poeta legge un pittore, at 18.00 on Tuesday 29 November.

Mark Strand (1934-2014) was one of the foremost American poets of his generation. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and numerous prestigious American and international prizes, he served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990. A frequent visitor to Italy and a great lover of Rome, Strand read at St Stephen’s in 2009 upon the publication of his collection, Uomo e Cammello/Man and Camel.

Also trained as a painter, Strand was particularly interested in the work of Edward Hopper. “Of the many pieces of writing stimulated by Hopper,” John Updike wrote in The New York Review of Books, “none is more coolly and eerily attentive (more Hopperesque, we could say) than Mark Strand’s brilliant small book Hopper, showing how we are moved and disquieted by formal elements in the paintings. Strand describes Hopper’s human subjects, for example, as ‘characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company with no clear place to go, no future.’”

On the occasion of the major Edward Hopper exhibition currently at the Complesso del Vittoriano, Donzelli has reissued Strand’s “brilliant small book” of meditations on the works of Hopper. This new Italian edition includes a recent essay by Strand and an introduction by translators Damiano Abeni and St Stephen’s faculty member Moira Egan, as well as 30 beautiful, full-colour plates.