Brooks Haxton's latest book of poems, his sixth, brings together a rare appreciation for the lucidity of classical Hellenism, the usual inner preoccupations of the Baby Boom generation, and a happy respect for form and structure in poetry. The result is a mostly stimulating, often unexpected, sometimes illuminating collection.

Haxton, a translator of Greek literature, comes honestly by the casual, familiar references to Archimedes, Orpheus, and Heraclitus that are sprinkled through his work. Beyond that, his ease with the classics allows him to draw authoritative pictures of a frighteningly chaotic Hades and an ancient scribe's ordinary working environment.

The poet's job, however, is never just to echo lost civilizations or show his erudition but, in Shakepeare's phrase, "to give to airy nothingness/A local habitation and a name." Haxton's work fulfills that requirement. Much of it is intensely local, personal, even intimate. He describes his first sexual encounter, the delivery of his twin daughters (which, I suppose to the disgust of all women, he compares with his own experience of tooth extraction), and scenes of his Mississippi childhood with clear precision and telling emotional impact.

Like his fellow Southerner James Dickey, Haxton's best poems are narrative, using all the apparatus of a good short story. "Teenage Icon," for example, one of the longest in this collection, tells about the narrator's best friend in adolescence, with whom he fished, drank, and generally hung out. The scenes are described in almost eidetic detail:

After the rain quit, overflowing
mud-blond current from the river settled
in the backwaters into a deep tea green
as clear as we would ever see it.
We could spend all day adrift,
the rowboat filled with willow shade,
where twenty thousand straight tree trunks
in all directions stood neck-deep
or deeper in the flood. . . .

He'd be fifty, if he's still alive.
I saw him twenty years ago in a fern bar,
just before I moved away. On a night
that warm, he must have worn long sleeves
to hide the tracks, but he looked good.

that first time we made love, nighthawks
dove from out of sight among the stars
and just before they struck the earth
swerved – the woof of their wingfeathers
like Ben Webster's fluttering way down on the sax.

Soon after the Enlightenment, among Romantics, zero
as an idea dawned on Europe. Doctrine formed. Division
into zero, and by zero, zero parts of zero, overflowed
into a great nonexistence where the empty set
lay empty of infinities and finitudes and of itself.

Never mind; a poet should be judged by his hits, not his misses. It's a pleasure to find a poet who knows poetry and seems to understand how it works. In his homage to Milton, "Memorizing 'Lycidas' Under the Warhol at the Walker," the long lines roll with something of Milton's own ponderous music, though the form is closer to Beowulf in its long lines See how the prosodies merge without any jarring:

Though no one I had met believed it genuine, it gave me goosebumps.
I was learning the flower passage, and my shift was ending,
when the next guard caught me with my xerox reading on the job,
aloud, how "daffadillies fill their cups with tears." . . .

. . . Look! If I could tell you
how I feel, maybe I wouldn't have to search
between the stitches in the window ice
and ransack disused languages for scraps
of God. . . .

. . . Of their own weight pages loosen, falling to my lap and to the floor. Snowflakes at the lower margins of the panes drift, in the night beyond, a few blurred spots of light. The calm inside the quiet falls away. In sleep, my twin girls, both of them at once, shift poses, . . .