Almost Invisible

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.)