Bruised Paradise

In this second collection (after 1992's A Circus of Want), Stein offers adept and accessible verse. He almost always writes personally: of an uncle with multiple sclerosis; of a brother-in-law who works as a telephone worker in an underground bomb-proof silo; of a painter temping as a telephone pollster; an unregretted, maybe planned, workplace accident that exempts a friend from Vietnam. In ""Fathers,"" he depicts his father listening on shortwave radio to ""the Japanese he liked best/ as a boy, its exotic clucks and twangs/ so otherworldly he'd pretend/ it was his father speaking to him/ heaven's indecipherable language."" A set of 12 poems offers vignettes of his great-great-grandfather who flees Germany's 1845 potato famine and sees 19th-century America--the way west, the underground railroad, the Civil War, a fierce labor strike. Other poems tackle more modern American concerns like race and Vietnam. Stein's lines, while accomplished, are modest. They don't draw attention to themselves but instead service his themes, chief of which is the labor of harvesting some meaningful or emotional truth from the hard soil of history, circumstance and mortality. (Sept.)