In her new book of poems, Kim Addonizio does many of the things she's done in her previous collections, writing in her persona of the bad girl who sleeps around, drinks too much, uses the occasional off-color word, and sometimes switching from her tight, high-voltage, free verse style to play ingenious games in closed forms ranging from the sonnet to the more exotic and esoteric. Only, in What is This Thing Called Love, Addonizio seems to be doing all of this even more keenly, wearing more deeply into that picturesque canyon of her poetic self. There are love poems here that cut to the quick, then go on ticking in the mind after the reading is done. There are gripe poems that so nail phoniness, shallowness, weak-sisterness, and hypocrisy that you've got to break off in the midst to chuckle and cheer. Maybe the best of this collection are her poems of consciousness, poems that zero in on moments or events that we share in common as human beings in the twenty-first century. In these latter poems she does a circus-difficult double thing: Addonizio speaks in a voice that's flip, funny, and ironic, and yet her effect is powerful and serious; she seizes her subjects and makes them hum. She has given us poems that make the 'real' palpable.

In this rich collection, W.S. Di Piero seeks the spirit and substance of illumination in all of its forms. He finds meaning, or shows us how we attempt to do so, in the rituals and events that mark our year---the Fourth of July, Halloween, New Year's Eve ---and in the ordinary activities of moving, dancing, drinking, trying to stay warm. "The Kiss" recounts how, as a young man, the poet was not called to the priesthood; in "Prayer Meeting," he recalls watching his mother iron with her "hopeless routine longing," and declares, "I wanted more than what I prayed for." For all their simplicity, Di Piero's direct, often conversational turns of phrase reveal a world aflame with troubles, with love, and with surprising lyrical epiphanies. W.S. Di Piero teaches at Stanford University and has received a Guggenheim and a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' Award, among other honors.

In Americus, Book I, his new book of poetry, Lawrence Ferlinghetti begins his own "born-in-the-U.S.A." trilogy, his explanation and exploration of America written as he cruised down the Mississippi on a steamboat, contemplating our landscape and collective history. Self-described as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic---a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Americus is a manifesto and an incantatory call to and definition of poetry itself. This book-length poem---edgy and using experimental form in parts---is probably his most compelling since A Coney Island of the Mind. Following in the classic tradition of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, Americus is Ferlinghetti's love song and cautionary ode to poetry and to America's idea of itself. Ferlinghetti received the Fred Cody Award in 1996, and the Los Angeles Times' Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award.

This may be Gary Snyder's most intimate book of poems, the collection that gives the reader most entry to the personal, inner man and the life that he's led. Much is familiar here: Snyder's trademark, cut-back syntax; his clear, wide-angle views of the natural world; and the pedal point of Buddhism. However, there's also a new ease, humor, and delightful sense of surprise to much of this writing. The book opens with a series of pieces that fulfill the promise of the title, many of them prose or prose poems that expatiate on mountains---climbing them, and living in and around them. (Since 1970, he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.) Many of the poems in the rest of the collection are short, not haiku but haiku-like, experiences of the natural world that look two ways: out to animals, plants, people and actions, and implicitly back to mirror the one who sees. With a section of longer poems, lyric or narrative, the collection rounds to a close with poems on Buddhism, 9/11 and the Taliban, and "Envoy," "A Turning Verse for the Billions of Beings." Danger on Peaks is the clear book of a mature poet writing at his best. Snyder received the Fred Cody Award in 1989, the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bollingen Poetry Prize among other honors.

In a wide variety of forms---short-line lyric to prose poem to a long sequence of persona poems---and through the wide curving of space---Machu Picchu to Spain, Shay Creek to Vietnam&emdash;Joseph Stroud sounds his plain, quiet lyric voice, a voice imbued with spiritual immanence. Country of Light is divided into four sections. "Plainsong" is a fan of lyric poems, love poems, travel, and nature. "Daybook, Nightbook: Shay Creek," presents a poetic journal of time spent in a wilderness cabin. "I Wanted to Paint Paradise" offers a series of prose poems in the persona of the legendary early Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone. "Passing Through" takes us along a series of travel poems or poems of place, ending with a group of poems on traveling through Vietnam, the last of which gives the book its title, "so we climb higher/ until at last we come out/ into a country of light/ above the clouds." Stroud has climbed a mountain with a fifteen year-old Hmong girl, his guide; she turns to him standing there on the peak and tells him that she comes to this spot from to time, "It's like having a clear mind," she says. That is very much the effect of Stroud's powerful book.

In Saving the Appearances, Liz Waldner offers the reader forty-three subtle, elegant poems that unfold into increasingly complex ranges of meaning and association. Waldner, who shows a deep understanding of the eccentricities of English, unpacks words and piles them up, forming completely original lyrical structures. For example in "Post Prandial," one of the many fine prose poems in the collection, she takes the reader on a linguistic roller coaster ride, interweaving synonyms, rhyme, and free association. "The tine of a fork," she writes, "the fork of a tree, the tree of life, the life of Reilly, and now it's either Irish or smiley. Eyes, nays, pince nez, sweat bee. A sweat bee reconnoitering me." Filled with Biblical cadences and daring explorations of the limits of language, Waldner's Saving the Appearances is a ground-breaking collection.