Almost invisible

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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

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. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A Banker in the Brothel of Blind Women A banker strutted into the brothel of blind women. "I am a shepherd," he announced, "and blow my shepherd's pipe as often as I can,but I have lost my flock and feel that I am at a critical point in my life.""I can tell by the way you talk,"said one of the women,"that you are a banker only pretending to be a shepherd and that you want us to pity you, which we do because you have stooped so low as to try to make fools of us." "My dear," said the banker to the same woman,"I can tell that you are a rich widow looking for a little excitement and are not blind at all." "This observation suggests," said the woman, "that you may be a shepherd after all, for what kind of rich widow would find excitement being a whore only to end up with a banker?""Exactly," said the banker. The Everyday Enchantment of Music A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until it became the memory of a night inVenice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty home of a heart in trouble.Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing, would become music, and the memory of what happened af- ter Venice would begin, and what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin. Poem of the Spanish Poet In a hotel room somewhere in Iowa an American poet, tired of his poems, tired of being an American poet, leans back in his chair and imagines he is a Spanish poet, an old Spanish poet, nearing the end of his life, who walks to the Guadalqui- vir and watches the ships, gray and ghostly in the twilight, slip downstream.The little waves, approaching the grassy bank where he sits, whisper something he can't quite hear as they curl and fall. Now what does the Spanish poet do? He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a notebook, and writes: Black fly, black fly Why have you come Is it my shirt My new white shirt With buttons of bone Is it my suit My dark-blue suit Is it because I lie here alone Under a willow Cold as stone Black fly, black fly How good you are To come to me now How good you are To visit me here Black fly, black fly To wish me good-bye Excerpted from Almost Invisible: Poems by Mark Strand All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.