CROWN OF WEEDS. <i> By Amy Gerstler</i> . <i> Penguin: 92 pp., $14.95</i>

The gods must be appeased--constantly, imaginatively--in the poetic universe of Amy Gerstler, where “The dead simply won’t stay dead / anymore.” Haunted by a variety of real and invented ghosts and maladies, she has created a singular body of work, at once witty, daring and full of pathos. The author of many books, including “Bitter Angel,” for which she received a National Book Critic’s Circle Award, Gerstler in her new collection of poems, “Crown of Weeds,” again proves herself to be adept at humoring the gods who wreak such havoc in our lives. “Bear in mind all journeys / are perilous,” she writes. It is for the wary traveler’s protection that she offers these charms and spells.

The most riveting poem in this book is dedicated to the traveler with the longest journey ahead of him: a newborn whose fists are smaller than the poet’s earrings. She thinks he has “the aura of someone who’s / just run a great distance.” She cannot wait for him to learn English. And after inventorying his qualities, she makes a special plea for his safekeeping to the “Protector of all beings”:

. . . Help him find

his true root. Do this at the most

humble request of one so terrified

(o, trailblazer, lord of conflicting

emotions, teacher of naked ascetics,

traveler ever arriving),

that the list of her fears would

weary to death anyone reading

this

sentence, were she to mention

them

all.

Gerstler’s refusal to flinch in the face of those fears is what makes “Crown of Weeds” so memorable.

This is especially true of two poems addressed to her brother, the victim of a brain tumor, whose gift for comforting his loved ones allays the “fear lodged in their throats like fish bones.” The same, of course, can be said of these poems. While “To My Brother” is a straightforward celebration of his bravery, calmness and grace in the midst of tragedy, in “Miasma” the poet declares herself to be a believer in his belief that “this miasma will evaporate.” Her evidence?

. . . Every day you pass through

this mapless landscape unharmed,

a fruit falling to earth, so sure

of its ripeness.

Indeed, the gods will have their way with him, as they will with all of us, but there is something heartening in this poet’s efforts to turn that knowledge into revelations about our walk in the sun: its mysterious surfaces, its magical underpinnings.

Gerstler does not always succeed in this--who does?--for as she herself writes, “Even turmoil eventually / settles into relatively / fixed patterns.” A poet’s turmoil may translate, on the page, into a certain predictability or sameness of approach, and it is true that “Crown of Weeds” is not marked by tremendous formal variety. Gerstler’s flights of fancy are sometimes cute instead of acute, and her chains of association will occasionally take on a machine-like quality, the remedy for which she well knows: “Time to ignite the gut fire, / my pilot light,” she reminds herself.

And it is when Gerstler lights that fire that otherwise ordinary moments take on a startlingly fresh aspect. Then she is the wisecracker in the face of the inexplicable, the holy fool at the Court of Last Things. We are doomed to lose what she lovingly calls “the perfumed, / bejeweled world,” yet she will not surrender to the “silent anarchy” of colors and scents flaring and fading:

. . . Throughout

the pervasive gray of disgrace, the

purple

of complaint, despite your , alternating caresses

and attempts to shrug me off, I

swear

by the reek of the dung heap, by

the slip

and slide of white silk, by the

feelings

you stupidly unleashed in me, I

will never

lose you completely in the

gathering tide

of colorlessness, due to love’s

stubborn tint.

That tint is an unwavering commitment to remain open to experience, no matter what the cost.

In the title poem, for example, a monologue by John Ruskin, the famous art critic, finds late in life that he “remain[s] more or less defenseless,” and that is why he can “still consume the world / with [his] eyes[.]” Gerstler, an accomplished art critic in her own right, views the dizzying world of Los Angeles in much the same way. It is with a mixture of dread and delight that she gathers into her poems everyone and everything from elephant attendants to the underworld, now writing a recipe for resurrection, now writing one for trouble. “Born at the outset / of this tranquilizer age,” she is determined to stay awake in order to register the psyche’s least tremors. “Crown of Weeds” is a wise and wonderful seismograph of the soul.