Mark Strand, former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner for his collection Blizzard of One (1998), died from liposarcoma, a rare cancer of the fat cells, at his daughter Jessica Strand’s home in Brooklyn last weekend. He was 80.

Strand’s work spanned fifty years, and along with his many award-winning poetry collections are three children’s books, five edited anthologies, a couple of prose books, three volumes of translations, and three art books. As USC professor Carol Muske-Dukes explained in her obituary of Strand for the Los Angeles Times, much of his work meditated on the conventional subjects of death and love, but in radically revisionary ways. In particular, Strand rendered death “funny,” in a “joyfully low-key lunatic” kind of way, wrote Muske-Dukes.

In a 1998 interview for the Paris Review, Strand described his work as an exploration of “the self, the edge of the self, and the edge of the world…that shadow land between self and reality.” In the decade before the interview, however, Strand had come to a sort of impasse in his work, which he felt was “too autobiographical” and repetitive.

“I felt I had to sort of break through that limitation,” he said. “And so you have, in my long poem Dark Harbor, many other things cropping up. You have Marsyas and the Mafia, the muzhiks being slaughtered, Russian women at a dinner party.”

Indeed, Strand continued to develop his work and received many awards. In addition to the Pulitzer, he won a MacArthur fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He also taught at many universities, including, most recently, Columbia University.

David Kirby, who wrote a book about Strand’s work and teaches English at Florida State University, told The New York Times that Strand is “…up there with Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin and Philip Levine. He makes you see how trivial the things of this world are, and how expansive the self is, once you unhook it from flat-screen TVs and iPhones. We learn what a big party solitude is.”

Read one of Strand’s own “epitaphs,” “My Death.”