August Kleinzahler fam-ously began one of his essays with this bit of sly revelation, "It was the dog who raised me."

Some might shrug that off as hyperbole, the well-oiled opening remark of a baggy-pants comedian, but I'm of a mind to take Kleinzahler at his word. In the poems in his new collection, he displays an almost canine ear in his ability to key into language of a "higher pitch" easily gone unnoticed by the rest of us.

		"SLEEPING IT OFF IN RAPID CITY: POEMS, NEW AND SELECTED" By August Kleinzahler Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($26)

Notice the fluorescing sibilance in these lines from "Secondary Sexual Characteristics":

Spindrift of grunion spume in moonlight

Granular, sorrel-colored, ammoniac

Upon the tide's retreat

A meniscus of foam hissing in sand

In "Retard Spoilage, there's the crunchy rat-a-tat of, "Animalcules heave their tackling,/ladders of polysaccharides/onto meatmilkshrimp&creamy emulsions."

Kleinzahler resembles no canine more than the mutt you occasionally find seated atop a ragged stool at some faded pub, the sort of alcoholic dog that sometimes figures into a James Crumley novel.

Kleinzahler's poems typically have the feeling of having spent many hours in dark taverns, ears cocked toward the thick, slow voices and the blarney of which they are full.

"The Hereafter" finds Kleinzahler, or his surrogate, at heaven's gate where,

A Semitic chap -- the greeter, I suppose --

gives me the quick once-over

and most amused he seems to be. Has me figured.

Not unlike a gent I met only last week,

a salesman at a stereo shop on Broadway.

These poems act as intersections between the high and low. Whether it's the similarities between St. Peter and a stereo salesman, or the commingling of the mundane and the literary in this reverie,

What is more touching

than a used-bookstore on Saturday night,

dowdy clientele haunting the aisles:

the girl with bad skin, the man with a tic,

some chronic ass at the counter giving his art speech?

Having worked evening hours in a used bookstore I found these lines particularly spot-on, both amusing in their wry detail, but also quite moving in the expression of the ordinary clientele on a humdrum Saturday night surrounded by stacks and shelves of literature, poetry and philosophy.

Bad skin and all, we human beings are always reaching for something higher, something deeper. And then, of course, the line "dowdy clientele haunting the aisles" performs a tidy bit of supernatural surgery, or perhaps it's the books themselves that do this, and release our souls to mingle with that which is an expression of our souls.

There's a generosity of spirit at work in these poems, but also present is the sort of tension that comes from having one eye on God and the other watching the crowded city streets. The two cannot be resolved so the poems become a space where the human and the divine can feel each other out, as in these lines from "Where Souls Go":

Imagine them in the eaves

Among pigeons

Or clustered around the D train's fan

As we cross the bridge to Brooklyn. ..........

Ultimately, poems are little machines made expressly to transmogrify, or if you like, transubstantiate, the ordinary. That which is memorialized, whether it is a person, place, or event is lifted out of the workaday, re-framed, made anew. Poems practically shout at the reader, "Take notice, for this is important!"

... out on the highway, four miles from town, on a stool in the Snack

Bar of Empire Lanes, sneering as the pins go down, all at once and on cue,

with an almighty crack radiating out from Pawtucket to Geyserville;

and you knock back a codeine between gulps of fries as the TV

overhead

shows a rerun of Kojak you saw a decade ago in a Canberra motel.

The syntax, reminiscent of the King James Version of the Bible, and the subject matter collide. Kleinzahler seems to say, God and Telly Savalas, this is what it's like to be human.