Lively Language : James Tate is the winner of this year’s National Book Award for poetry : WORSHIPFUL COMPANY OF FLETCHERS, <i> By James Tate (The Ecco Press: $20; 80 pp.)</i>

Awards do not make the man, but in this case the recognitions are well-deserved. James Tate’s first book, “The Lost Pilot,” won the Yale Series of Younger Poets’ Award in 1967. His 1991 “Selected Poems” earned both a Pulitzer and the William Carlos Williams Award. This book won the National Book Award for poetry last week.

Tate is a pure and unique American poet. His spirited language-play is modulated by a refreshingly consistent vigor and intelligence. I often read him to pull myself out of one of the 99 kinds of stupor I’m apt to fall into in all weathers, and a couple of Tate poems never fail to raise my mental pep level at least 10 degrees. The precision of Tate’s imagination and its energetic expression makes the surfaces of his poems effervescent, better than champagne mixed with Alka-Seltzer, like many of Frank O’Hara’s poems. Tate’s poems aren’t urbane like O’Hara’s--they’re not infused with O’Hara-ish wickedly wistful city-life banter but populated instead by squirrels and elands relating their dating histories or holding down jobs: “A glowworm drove by/on its way to a Philosophy Department meeting” (“A Glowworm, a Lemur, and Some Women”), or wry moments at the pet cemetery: “We had a custom-made coffin for the boa./It was fifty times longer than a pencil box./As for the parakeet, she fit inside a snowball” (“Jim Left the Pet Cemetery With a Feeling of Disgust”). The voice of the much-missed Donald Barthelme’s fiction comes to mind when reading Tate’s tart, often deadpan amalgams of arcane narrative formality, and absurdity.

The humorous, rueful texts in “Worshipful Company of Fletchers” never end up frivolous or flyweight. They’re handy pockets into which their author has slipped whiffs of the ineffable. Just when you think you’re too amused reading Tate, and you begin to fret in some sort of Calvinistic, guilty way that all this merriment and wit is perhaps writ at the expense of deeper concerns, lines miraculously appear like tiny swords in the poems, to fence with the metaphysical ponderings or weird doubts that course through all of us every minute, as in these two passages from “50 Views of Tokyo”: “Once I sat on the toilet in the lobby/of the wrestling amphitheater for several hours/astonished that this was my life, my only life,/and I had nothing better to do than sit there.” And later in the poem:

. . . I was a wild animal

without a soul or a home or a name.

And now I see it wasn’t a stage I was

going through.

That stage, that stageless stage, was

my home

and my name and my soul, and the

maze of years

and the endless palaver, the well-

wishing like a blue smoke circling,

the world order

tilting this way and that, the extinct

species

coming back to haunt, the rice birds

and the butterflies

circling and disappearing, O I longed

for one firm

handshake and a kick in the butt I

could understand.

Beating just underneath these poems’ delightful image-gymnastics thumps the meditative rhythm of a human psyche nodding in time to the melodies of its own consciousness.

One of the most satisfying and elusive things about Tate’s writing is how the voice ends up sounding seamlessly composed of such a range of exclamations. Individual lines repeatedly achieve a wonderful synthesis of the nutty, the sage and the lyrical. “Pixies germinated in the still pools under streetlights” (“What the City Was Like”). The poems are not above unalloyed, giggling moments of language silliness: “I hope you don’t think I am being namby-pamby/when I say frog spittle is upon me” (“Becoming a Scout”). Although Tate’s sprightly sensibility is more Ariel than Caliban, he seems ever capable of turning a line that’s darkly succinct when he chooses, like “The deceased seemed pleased” (“Jim Left the Pet Cemetery With a Feeling of Disgust”), or “The willow itself is finally dying, having/strangled everything within its great reach/for half a century . . . “ (“Porch Theory”). Or, he’ll come up with a line that holds its part of the poem in place by being just plain lovely, in both sound and implication: “Consequently, white flowers divide,/never reconcile . . . “ (“Color in the Garden”). Armed with a lifetime supply of eye-widening details, Tate somehow constructs poems that work beautifully as wholes, out of all these far-flung kinds of lines--parts that seem impossible to combine in a coherent, much less an effective way. Like a Luther Burbank of the word world, Tate had grafted walnut, peach, magnolia and pussy willow branches onto the same trunk and made them all flourish as a viable, new breed of tree that makes its own intense botanical sense.

I know of no American poet living or dead who makes better use of humor as an explorer’s tool, to probe thought, experience and emotion, much as a 15-year-old boy employs his trusty fork to probe his mother’s cryptic dinner casserole in search of friendly, edible ingredients. “How the Pope is Chosen” is possibly the most hilarious poem I’ve read this decade. The temptation to reprint it in its entirety is great, but restraint will be the rule. Here are just the first 20 lines:

Any poodle under ten inches high is

a toy.

Almost always a toy is an imitation

of something grownups use.

Popes with unclipped hair are called

corded popes.

If a Pope’s hair is allowed to grow

unchecked,

it becomes extremely long and twists

into long strands that look like ropes.

When it is shorter it is tightly

curled.

Popes are very intelligent.

There are three different sizes.

The largest are called standard

Popes.

The medium-sized ones are called

miniature Popes.

I could go on like this, I could say:

“He is a squarely built Pope, neat,

well proportioned, with an alert

stance

and an expression of bright

curiosity,”

but I won’t. After a poodle dies

all the cardinals flock to the nearest

7-Eleven.

They drink slurpies until one of

them throws up

and then he’s the new Pope.

I’ve long been an admirer of Tate’s toothsome, odd writing, the way he bends facts into new and entertaining shapes like a hired clown at a kid’s backyard birthday party fashioning balloon sculptures: “The simoom is a strong, dry wind/that spreads mayonnaise over the deserts of North America.” But having literary or any other type of heroes can be a blueprint for disappointment. One’s idol’s inspiration can flag over the course of a long and tiring career, or he may begin repeating himself, get stuck, over-publish, miscalculate, lose faith, succumb to self-parody, grow bitter, empty out, swell with arrogance . . . the pit-falls are too numerous to count. Tate, however, seems to be a rigorous enough artist to avoid major missteps. Or, if he makes them, he doesn’t do it in public. His new book is as fresh and moving as his appreciators have come to expect. “Worshipful Company of Fletchers” is one of the best examples of sharp-as-a-tack contemporary American language-liveliness you’re likely to find on bookshelves these days, and it has the added advantage of not being soul-less. As witty as John Ashbery’s but less distant, these poems vibrate with the funny, solemn elasticity of great cartoon’s rapid transformations, causing gasps of surprise. If, as some of both the medium’s champions and detractors claim, poetry in all its forms needs a shot in the arm in our media besotted age, then Tate’s work is definitely a therapeutic elixir.