Though Mark Strand has previously shown a dark comic power to discomfort, his … volume of poems, The Late Hour, and his short prose work, The Monument, lack clout. His vision (and he is a poet of vision) hardly unfolds; he seems uncertain of what to say. A momentary clarification comes in "Lines for Winter":

         Tonight as it gets cold
         tell yourself
         what you know which is nothing
         but the tune your bones play
         as you keep going. And you will be able
         for once to lie down under the small fire
         of winter stars …

But the view is dubiously rudimentary (perhaps we cannot know so little or even so much) and the verse alter Merwin. For the rest, day comes like "sweet marrow" to be sucked. These two notes are picked out again and again as if on a piano in an empty auditorium (for the verse never...