Beginning of May reads

Since Hrabal, I've been on something of a tear, helped along especially by strong prose:
Stevie Smith, Best Poems [NDP]: light verse with a dark edge (or is it a heavy undertow?) but no less (and little more than) light verse for that, but no worse for that than the best such.
Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String [Dalkey Archive]: categorized as "stories" but too integrated for that designation, but then every designation is up in the air, proper names improperly purposed, terminologies terminating each chapter shedding more heat than light. There's glory for you (as H.D. put it).
Adam Fitzgerald, The Late Parade [Liveright]: More hit-or-miss than Donnelly, which of course means more miss, uneven even at stanza level (not the craft, the affect). I wanted to like it more, for the shared touchstones (eg Chirico), perhaps that got in my way. Something did.
Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale (Victoria Cribb) [FSG]: latterday saga of an unnatural naturalist in banishment, more substantial than The Whispering Muse (nice conceit well played but) (cf TQC review).
Rodrigo Rey Rosa, The African Shore (Jeffrey Gray) [Yale/Margellos]: pared-down pairing of a shepherd and a Columbian self-exile in waiting in and around Tangier (cf BOMB interview).
David Malouf, An Imaginary Life [Vintage]: the exiled Ovid's meta-Metamorphoses, back to whence he came.
Raymond Queneau, Hitting the Streets (Rachel Galvin) [Carcanet]: a long-missing piece englished, tying together the strands of the demotic and Paris locales (and wordplay, though that's doubly hard to carry over, partly compensated by bilingual presentation, though proficiency in proper French only goes so far).

(Taking a break from that lit chatboard, thanks thereto [you know who you are] for some of the pointers ...)