Tango

The poems in Halpern's latest collection are bittersweet postcards redolent with travels and memories. A cafe in Tangiers, vacations on Maine's coast, a boyhood in Chicago, the shooting of a friend on a Mexican busall are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that might explain how the poet's destiny, in turn, took shape or failed to materialize. In one section Halpern summons the muses or spirits of Dante, ""the bandit'' Caravaggio, Keats, Pound and Li Po, but most of the poems here flow from personal experience. Halpern proclaims that scars on the flesh betray the mind's lesions (``part of the map marking/ the pain we've had to endure''). But as he reflects on death, scattered families, the end of loves and pleasures, a faith in humanity glimmers like fireflies ``born again elsewhere/ in the line of small trees.'' Halpern is editor of Antaeus and Ecco Press. (March)