Almost Invisible

January 16, 2012
Strand’s 13th collection comprises a series of short prose poems that borrow elements of fables as well as more modern forms of fiction, all with the grim turns and deadpan beauty for which Strand, who won the Pulitzer and is among the most famous American poets, is known. In one poem a man returns “to the country from which he had started many years before” to find, in his childhood playground, “dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges. Empty bags littered the grass.” Another waxes nostalgic about nostalgia itself, “those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with a purpose of impossible grandeur.” A poem called “In the Afterlife” asks, “When no one remembers, what is there?” These are poems of failing light, meditations on death’s nearness that do nothing to stave it off. This is a short book, but Strand’s many fans won’t be disappointed.

January 1, 2012
Strand, a major poet of elegantly meditative inquiries, presents a collection of ethereal prose poems that read like koans and parables. People dissemble. Time is unruly. Inexplicable moments occur beside the wrinkling, sorrowing sea. Landscapes are bleak, wind-scoured, disorienting. The gates to nowhere multiply and the present is so far away, so deeply far away. Nothing is as it seems. Language is all we have to go on, and language is both path and shadow, rope and smoke. Strand's titles suggest his by turns melancholy and ironic metaphysics: Clarities of the Nonexistent, The Enigma of the Infinitesimal, Provisional Eternity. The rueful poet of lonesomeness, nothingness, travels without arrivals, Strand is also sharply funny, foxily ribald, and teasingly surreal. There is beauty here, albeit fleeting and steeped in yearning, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of a summer night. And within these compact paragraphs, these brief, mysterious dream stories, the breathtaking cadence and resonant harmonics of words so precisely chosen and placed form exquisite, enrapturing, provoking, and shivery poems to be read and reread, lingered and marveled over.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)