Mark Strand was born in 1934 on Prince Edward Island in Canada. His parents were from the United States. His father did many different things—you could call him a businessman—and his mother was at different times a schoolteacher and an archaeologist. When Strand was an infant, the family lived in Halifax, then Montreal. When he was four years old, they moved to Philadelphia. Attending public school there, Strand at first spoke very little English and had a heavy French accent. “Mocked and generally brutalized by my classmates,” Strand learned English fast. But then his father, now working for Pepsi-Cola, took the family to Cuba, Colombia, Peru and Mexico. “I moved around so much, and went to so many different schools, that I never found my own place,” Strand has said. “I really come from nowhere. But I was fortunate in that many of my summers were spent on St. Margaret’s Bay, near Halifax.” During these happy summers, he discovered a landscape “that became internalized,” that became “the one I carried with me wherever I went: the sea, the runty pines along the coast, the big lichen-covered boulders, cold mornings . . .”