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Recalling the bleakness of a blue-collar childhood--a father with ``nothing to say,'' worn out from tending a glass furnace, and a mother bored with the drudgery of housework--Oresick effectively evokes the hopelessness of empty American lives: ``When I think of my mother, / she is always hanging clothes. / My father is on the couch,/sleeping off the factory / and saying No. '' Several poems in this collection, however, are infused with a profound religiousness that enables the poet to transcend despair and ``rise / through abysses of air / and enter,'' at least poetically, the ``Gate of Heaven.'' Oresick's spirituality is in pleasing proportion to the predicament of his reality: there is a quiet beauty about common lives, passed down from one generation to the next, from which the poet derives the miracle of faith. He must ultimately defer to a voice inside, ``always faint, persistent, / hinting for me to trust . . . / and all manner of things shall be well. '' Oresick's language is economical yet meaningful, translating in very precise terms the rich and varied contents of his consciousness. Oresick co-edited Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life. (Nov.)