Five previous books have established that Mark Strand is a superb lyric poet, particularly in Darker (1970). He gives us now two new books, of which The Monument is a meditation in a subtly imaginative prose, and The Late Hour a gathering of 25 lyrics written during the last five years.

Strand is one of those poets, like Geoffrey Hill, who seem to write only a few poems a year. The rigor of his art achieves a gently witty manifesto in The Monument, which is a meditation in the tradition of Unamuno, a baroque reverie upon the idea that Vico called poetic divination, the poet's quest for immortality. Gently parodying the American model of such divination, Song of Myself, Strand's The Monument weaves together prose and some verse in 52 sections, almost all of a page or less in length. The prose and verse are mostly by Strand, but the book's...