which begins, wryly, with “Another Elegy.” When I heard Hall read this poem, he explained that the fiction of the poem allowed him to write his long-stalled elegy for the poet James Wright, who died in 1980. Bill Trout, the dead poet remembered in “Another Elegy,” is a creature of invention, but this has been the case in poets' elegies for fellow poets, from Milton at least. How much does “Lycidas” tell us about dead Edward King, and how much about ambitious John Milton? Even the rhetoric of praise and blame distorts the remembered life. Hall writes a canny critique of the form and its history:

It is twelve Aprils since we buried
          him. Now dissertation-
salt preserves The Collected Poems
          of William Trout
like Lenin. Here is another elegy in
          the tradition
of mourning and envy, love and self-
          love—as another morning
delivers rain on the fishbone leaves
          of the rotted year.

The humor with which Hall delivers and lampoons the conventions of elegy is carried further by the hilarious spoof of the canonizing poet's bio, “from” the imaginary The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Verse. Appearing in the “notes” section of The Museum of Clear Ideas, this further fiction lays bare a convention of contemporary poetry books: the appendix of notes used as an exhibit of the poet's learning and as a key to obscurities the reader will have encountered.

Hall identifies the persona, Horace Horsecollar, who speaks the odes of the poem “The Museum of Clear Ideas,” in such a note: “Lacking Latin, he follows his master visually—the number and shape of stanzas in Horace's first book of odes.” These poems form the volume's second sequence, in which the range of tones and topics widens even further. As in “Another Elegy” and “Baseball,” the state of contemporary poetry comes under Hall's scrutiny; Horsecollar does not exempt his ventriloquizer when he criticizes: “Praising our places, we / praise ourselves while pretending to look outward.” Poets build shrines to themselves,

in every Poetry, by printing
          reflections, in free verse
                    without noticeable attention to
line breaks, on snapshots of the
          poetic mother and father,
                    in their weird clothes, on
                              vacation, before
the poet was born: How poignant it
          is, how remarkable
                    that one's parents were older
                              than oneself!
Then they died. Oh.

This cutting indictment of the bland subject matter and weak form of contemporary poetry does not attempt to disguise Hall's own interest in remembering persons and places, in fixing the details of daily life in verse. In The Museum of Clear Ideas a reader will find love poems, poems about a sick parent, frightening diagnoses, aging, sex, and the old neighborhood. Hall does not eschew the ordinary; he inhabits it. Books and poems and language belong in this poet's everyday world, so we find poems about old affairs or old friends cheek by jowl with his criticism of contemporary poetry.

Hall's determination to renew language's energetic engagement with the world calls our attention to the rhetoric we use in our daily interactions. Hall deplores the falsity of what he calls “The Jargon of Things,” and “The Tongue of High Coy.” In a book preoccupied with the problem of making an end, of reacting honestly to the endings that herald our own foregone conclusion, the danger of language's misuse should not be underestimated.

The final poem in the book, “Extra Innings,” takes up the fear of death directly. In these extra poems, which surprise the reader with a return to “Baseball,” Hall suggests that compassionate actions and the solaces of dailiness can hold fear at bay. Loss is forestalled but not denied in the conclusion to “Extra Innings,” which recalls the penultimate game of the 1975 World Series:

                    I wear my yellow sweater;
we eat scrambled eggs from blue and
          white dishes; her
hair's kerchief is yellow. We gather
          yellow days
inning by inning with care to appear
          careless,
thinking again how Carlton Fisk
          ended game Six
in the twelfth inning with a poke over
          the wall.

Do I need to point out that the Red Sox go on to lose the Series in the seventh game? Anyone who has suffered with a team, or waited for the results of the blood test to come in, knows the condition that Hall describes, “inning by inning with care to appear careless.” Hall celebrates the ceremonial calendar of the baseball season in its relation to human lives. In poetry, in patterned language unleashed in time, Hall arrests us in the moment of hope that holds off the end.