The Bird Catcher.

Poems Marie Ponsot Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 91 pp.

Read over time, a journal like Commonweal begins to feel like a friend, known well enough to be praised and abused, missed when it goes away over the summer vacation, relied upon to recommend its favorite books. Marie Ponsot's The Bird Catcher begs to be pressed into the hands of a friend. I know I will not be alone among Commonweal readers to recognize Marie Ponsot's name and poems from these pages, and I hope I will be forgiven for quoting at length, in case anyone out there has missed her. Take a gulp of this poem,

"Underbutter"

This house has three entrance-ways. Water flushes its hidden places.

Sun-flush slides rosily off the wall. Dusk dawns. Cats want out. Deer nose out of the woodlot. Bats scour the near air as it cools.

Wheel-house: the house rides a cooling land-mass. Oceans hiding desirable continents flank it. The round earth turns as it rides.

Its flank turned to the flank of the hill, the dog turns off the vista and sniffs at fresh grass.

Angels fly into the fresh vat of cream & suddenly it's butter.

Sudden awe sudden dread: the visible fontanelle just under the scalp of the delicate new-born head.

The delicate tip of the window geranium broke off. The root-threads pop out a strong bud, lower down.

Let me begin by commenting on the end. Marie Ponsot writes wonderful ends of poems. This final pair of lines tells a story of loss and recovery, set in the vital miniature world of the window box. It suggests not only the burgeoning that can be induced by pruning, but the adjusted point of view that enables us to see the "strong bud, lower down." The poem has already carried its reader through a dizzying variety of perspectives - in the house, hearing the water somewhere - looking out at various times of day - suddenly spinning and dwarfed by the scale of landmass, oceans, and planet - shuffled down from earth flank, hill flank, dog flank, to the dog's nose - whisked from the ether with the angels into the interior of the churn. What could the "underbutter" be? (I don't know, but I want some!) - perhaps some of it lies through the fontanelle "just under the scalp/of the delicate new-born head." Though the poem's speaker tacitly urges adjustments in consciousness, it scarcely reveals the mind of the human person inside the container of the house. "Underbutter" is mysterious: "Sudden awe sudden dread" pulses a rare inward interruption in the searching outward gaze, in the terse descriptions.

Close to the kennings of Anglo-Saxon verse, Ponsot's evocative word pairs comprise a bright thread running through the poem's fabric: "entrance-ways," "sun-flush," "woodlot," "wheel-house," 'land-mass," "new-born," and "root-threads" evoke an archetypal pattern of arrival, dissolution, cycling back. This tale, embedded in the nouns, does not contradict the top layer of implicit story: a person (woman?) in a house considers its structure, notes both times of day and woodland neighbors, carries out ordinary tasks without dulling to their mysteries, considers two kinds of delicacy, human and vegetable. Along the way the earth gets older, cream turns to butter, and the sight or memory of an infant's skull swerves into the sublime emotions of awe and dread. The causes of these disorientingly different actions remain obscure, except for the angels who make the butter come. This gives the poem the feel of riddling, as in the first stanza: 'This house has three entrance-ways./Water flushes its hidden places." Answer: the body? Question: Is then the underbutter the soul or the life force inside?

Marie Ponsot's poems both invite and disarm this kind of readerly questioning. Some poems are so direct that a collection of their last lines can reasonably evoke the power of their themes. From "One is One," a command addressed to a wayward heart: "Join the rest of us, / and joy may come, and make its test of us." From "Pourriture Noble," a moral: "Age is not/all dry rot. It's never too late./Sweet is your real estate." From "The Border": "Getting married is like that./Getting married is not like that." And from "Festival of Bread": "The widow shoves her night-time self aside,/kneads silence down into dough, and lets it rise." This sampler of conclusions suggests how accessible, how aphoristic, and even quotable Ponsot's poems can be. Yet there is never anything pat about the thinking or phrasing even in the most rigorously formal of the verses.

Ponsot risks losing some readers when she returns again and again to elaborate Provencal verse forms, sestinas and villanelles, and she ups the ante when she adds (arcanely) two "tritinas," one of which I quote below. A tritina goes the troubadours one better, evidently requiring the recycling, in decasyllabic lines, of three end words in one-two-three, three-one-two, two-three-one order, with a concluding line that employs each end word in one-two-three order. (There may be other rules I have not discerned.)

"Living room"

The window's old & paint-stuck in its frame. If we force it open the glass may break. Broken windows cut, and let in the cold

to sharpen house-warm air with outside cold that aches to buckle every saving frame & let the wind drive ice in through the break

till chair cupboard walls stormhit all goods break. The family picture, wrecked, soaked in cold, would slip wet & dangling out of its frame.

Framed, it's a wind-break. It averts the worst cold.

What makes a poem in so tight and elaborate a form transcend the sense of exercise? The resolute plainness of the language helps to justify the densely packed repetitions. Perhaps also the intimation that a lapse in the performance, like the imagined crack in the pane, would "buckle every saving frame," adds to the urgency of the wordsmith's work. With anti-Romantic sentiment, this poem casually props no wind harp (Aeolian lyre) to await inspiration and let in the destructive wet. Far better, the poem suggests, to stick with a tight container, a form that acts as a windbreak and preserves home and family, averting "the worst cold." Like Elizabeth Bishop, another poet who conjured up the elemental from the homeliest of subjects, Marie Ponsot uses demanding forms without making the reader feel the strain of artfulness.

Suzanne Keen teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.