Almost Invisible by Mark Strand
I’d
only read a couple of former Poet Laureate Mark Strand’s poems before rescuing
his most recent collection from under a collection of booze-moldy umbrellas in a
lost and found bin somewhere. The assumption for me was always that, for at
least the last twenty years, one’s appointment to the position of Poet Laureate
was the clearest indication of the embarrassing unreadability of one’s oeuvre (with
the exception of probably only Charles Simic). Might have to quell the haterade
because Almost Invisible’s 50 prose
poems are for the most part on point. Disappearing is the name of the game here, whether that
means the past, the not-happened-but-will, into those weird spaces sandwiched between
time, the darkness where “my freedom and my happiness” reside. The deceptively
simple sentence constructions are embedded with a playful and beguiling
elusiveness, something I’d compare to fellow septuagenarians James Tate, Simic,
and even Tomaz Salamun, though Tate comes off as more sinister (and better) and
Salamun delves much deeper into Rubik-like abstraction. Maybe 20 percent of Almost Invisible is nostalgic fluff – “those
moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies
in the perfumed heat of a summer night” – but the good stuff outweighs the meh,
allowing the really taut 100-word jams to linger with a distinctive happy-sad
luminosity:
(Knopf,
2012)
53
pages
I’d
only read a couple of former Poet Laureate Mark Strand’s poems before rescuing
his most recent collection from under a collection of booze-moldy umbrellas in a
lost and found bin somewhere. The assumption for me was always that, for at
least the last twenty years, one’s appointment to the position of Poet Laureate
was the clearest indication of the embarrassing unreadability of one’s oeuvre (with
the exception of probably only Charles Simic). Might have to quell the haterade
because Almost Invisible’s 50 prose
poems are for the most part on point. Disappearing is the name of the game here, whether that
means the past, the not-happened-but-will, into those weird spaces sandwiched between
time, the darkness where “my freedom and my happiness” reside. The deceptively
simple sentence constructions are embedded with a playful and beguiling
elusiveness, something I’d compare to fellow septuagenarians James Tate, Simic,
and even Tomaz Salamun, though Tate comes off as more sinister (and better) and
Salamun delves much deeper into Rubik-like abstraction. Maybe 20 percent of Almost Invisible is nostalgic fluff – “those
moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies
in the perfumed heat of a summer night” – but the good stuff outweighs the meh,
allowing the really taut 100-word jams to linger with a distinctive happy-sad
luminosity:
It is
winter and he walks hunched over with the collar of his coat turned up. When he
gets to his room, he sits at a small table and looks at the book open before
him. Its pages are blank, which is why he is able to gaze at them for hours.
At his
best, Strand reminds me of an out-of-place, oddly genteel old dude at the end
of a sketchy dive bar in a David Lynch movie doling out quiet wisdom expulsions
that resonate in our world-bleary eardrums, even when they’re ungraspable. Which,
in the end, is really nice considering the last hardcover major label
collection I read was Billy Corgan’s fetid abortion of non-rhyming (and even
worse when they occasionally do rhyme) Smashing Pumpkins outtakes otherwise
known as Blinking with Fists. That
book made me wish it would disintegrate. Almost Invisible makes the illusion
fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment