Mark Strand’s easy-going charm and labored whimsy have a Seventies feel, as if the Bee Gees had never retired. The prose poems in Almost Invisible tilt toward contrived fables and dopey meditations, at worst self-indulgent musings after the imagination has shut down for the day and at best Kafka lite.1 Strand has always been a misfit in American poetry, his sleight-of-hand surrealism only half embraced, his strongest emotion subject to puckish doubt. He’s a master of the throwaway line (and also the throwaway poem, but I’ve used that joke about Ashbery). A banker walks into a brothel of blind women and claims he is a shepherd:

“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.

There’s a darkness to such drollery—the self-delusions of sex, the come-hither playacting (with a little slap at Arcadian fantasies, like those of Marie Antoinette),