Collected Poems of John Ciardi (C)

Here is the arithmetic: this collection, edited by Edward M. Cifelli, contains 450 of roughly 725 poems Ciardi wrote during his lifetime culled from 20 books published over a 53-year period (1940-1993). Here are the poetics: an unerring sense of end rhyme, a bravery of language and a depth of scope large enough to contain both a religious tract, ""The Lamb"" (""Its flesh was Easter"") and a Beat elegy for Dylan Thomas (""Saint Binge at death in his own meat""). And here is the topography: the earliest poems seem written from high up, looking down over backyards and train tracks; then, by 1947, we are indeed airborne in Ciardi's best work, a series of beautifully wrought war poems centered on his days aboard a bomber (""See how it clouds: a dream left on the sea""). A slow and professorial dip into peacetime ensues. Academia, God and love are the foci, jarred by a scattering of more war poems that disturb Ciardi's peace like a recurring nightmare. Tangential lines of thought come from a 1967 ""Alphabestiary"" where ""R is for RAT, the noise in man's wall"" and from his 1971 autobiography in free verse, ""Lives of X."" In his final decades, Ciardi is no longer writing from above the backyards, but is in them, downstream from Updike amid a calm but slightly desperate morass of suburban neighbors, birds, bugs and pets--a soldier-poet not entirely resigned to the best years of his life. (Apr.)