HAY; Poems; By Paul Muldoon; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 224 pp., $22

A poet, unlike a movie actor, has no stunt double. But when the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon writes, in his eighth collection, “Hay,” “I was standing in for myself, my own stunt double / in a scene where I was meant to do a double / or maybe even triple back somersault,” on some level he’s offering the claim, both serious and sly, as a model for his own poetry. Muldoon’s work is characterized by feints and dodges and subtle ironies, by its tonal range from serious to comic, high to low, and by an expansive appetite for experience--linguistic, sexual and imaginative. At their charismatic best, Muldoon’s strange, vital poems deliver an instant pleasure, while their giddy sense of discovery keeps one coming back for more.

WINTER HOURS; Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems; By Mary Oliver; Houghton Mifflin: 110 pp., $22

Like Wendell Berry (who also writes poems filled with observations of the natural world and prose about sustainable living and community), Mary Oliver lives with such a profound sense of responsibility--”to live thoughtfully and intelligently”--that it makes a reader wonder how her poems manage to get off the ground and soar with such lightheartedness. It’s the precision, of course, of her observations and her vision. It’s the clarity that always makes things look light and easy. Ideally, in the company of good art we can forget how assiduously humans must strive for that clarity.

On the subject of writing poetry, Oliver is the most enlightened and enlightening author we have read, inspiring and chastening all at once: “I want every poem to ‘rest’ in intensity, I want it to be rich with ‘pictures of the world.’ . . . I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.” One is left with a breath of mystery.

READING RILKE; Reflections on the Problems of Translation; By William H. Gass; Alfred A. Knopf: 234 pp., $26

“The poet himself,” William H. Gass writes of Rilke, “is as close to me as any human being has ever been. . . . [H]is work has taught me what real art ought to be; how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until the writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes. . . .” “Reading Rilke,” a deep celebration of reading and translating, is a kind of antidote for when words become unhinged from meaning, an antidote to the loneliness of reading and of writing. Gass repairs the arteries between the heart and the mind and the mouth and the hand, giving them new flexibility and vigor. It is clear that Gass thinks less of the poet than of the poet’s work, which has given him a standard to try, for a lifetime, to live up to.

Nonetheless, Gass’ understanding of Rilke’s life is remarkably eloquent: Of Rilke’s death, rumored to be from the prick of a rose but actually from leukemia, Gass writes, “We grow our death inside us like a talent or a tumour.” Of the poet’s love life, he writes: “Love is always dreamed before it is performed.” Of the poet’s finances: “Poverty eventually disillusioned Rilke about poverty.” Gass sets up a firing line of 15 translations of a particular line and shoots: “Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid. Pitchford has never heard of Vietnam.” It is a clear and refreshing book, like bathing away the hollowness of the words we must translate every day.

THE OLDEST MAP WITH THE NAME AMERICA; New and Selected Poems; By Lucia Perillo; Random House: 148 pp., $19.95

“The Oldest Map With the Name America,” is an excellent introduction to the work of Lucia Perillo, offering seven poems from her 1989 debut volume, “Dangerous Life,” another 17 from her 1996 “The Body Mutinies” and 29 previously uncollected new poems. Many of the poems draw on memories of growing up in an Italian American neighborhood in New York.

Perillo’s themes include the mysteries of perception, sensation and memory; the oddity of language, human relationships, the relationship between mind and body; and, as she puts it, “love’s faulty hermeneutics: the muffler in retreat / mistaken for the motor coming, the declaration / of loathing construed as the minor reproach. . . .” She uses colloquial language and down-to-earth imagery in a way that is both engaging and elegant. Seldom if ever cheap, her ironies are carefully honed and often directed against herself. Perillo’s cool intelligence, her understated but irrepressible sense of humor and the overall felicity of her diction may remind some readers of the plangent, bell-toned voice of Elizabeth Bishop. But Perillo, while perhaps less subtly ingenious, is also less coy than Bishop can sometimes be. Her directness is distinctly refreshing.

MIDNIGHT SALVAGE; Poems 1995-1998; By Adrienne Rich; W.W. Norton: 96 pp., $22

For Adrienne Rich, there is no such thing as the inexpressible. From her beginnings as a polite ingenue formalist Yale Younger Poet, through her dramatic transformations into radical feminist, lesbian separatist, architect of a new revisionist poetics, late recoverer of Jewish roots, Whitman-esque chronicler of the dying Republic and finally--in “Midnight Salvage,” what she most unerringly is--reconstructed Metaphysical, author of a pure, resilient lyric, recombinant as a bead of mercury--her compass has remained set due north, where poetry and truth are aligned. “Midnight Salvage” reinforces its epigraph from George Oppen, “ . . . the issue is happiness / There is no other issue,” even as he laments that happiness cannot be measured. Rich is exploring the possibility of happiness, measure by measure.

It’s a hard-won, fierce-faced joy to be sure, lit by the banked fires of prisoners, exiled poets--but it is, in Adrienne Rich’s unbowed, ineluctable terms, humanly embodied and eminently, brilliantly expressible.

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET; By Fernando Pessoa; Translated from the Portugese by Alfred Mac Adam; Exact Change: 352 pp., $15.95

Fernando Pessoa is probably the greatest 20th century writer you have never heard of. Pessoa’s writings, his poetry and especially “The Book of Disquiet,” deliver a judgment on the 20th century, and he wants the world to take notice. “One day perhaps they will understand that I, like no other, did my life-long duty as an interpreter of a part of our century.” In his “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” he sweeps aside all the money-changers just like a secular Jesus, just like Whitman, and proclaims: “Get out of here, you politicians, literati, / You peaceful businessmen, policemen, whores, souteneurs, / All your kind is the letter that kills, not the spirit giving life. / The spirit giving life at this moment is ME!”