Peter Richardson, who is also given to formal neatness, opens The ABC of Belly Work with a poem about his job as an airport cargo handler, the belly being the hold of the plane. Naturally the title poem is filled with lists, a veritable cargo manifest. Perhaps his job shifting objects around has encouraged his use of vivid verbs: they jostle through the collection. Most notable are the verbs in “Coracle,” a poem about the birth of a child. The woman in labour is the “hide boat in a gale” and the assisting imminent father is a deckhand. The boat comes through in this joyous poem but only after some slithering and blatting of the child and “reswabbing” of the mother. He also has a very good poem in which the narrator distracts himself from a vasectomy by describing the intricacies of cargo handling to the physician. At the end, the patient is left holding a “wing-shaped bandaid” in place. The other extreme in this wide-ranging book is the powerful, graphic (but not exploitive) “At Hôtel-Dieu,” a poem about the suicide of a stepson. The poet seems to have reached a point in middle life when he feels compelled to cast a retrospective eye. Mostly he avoids sentimentality in doing so. A fine example of this kind of poem is “Ten Week Shiatsu Affair,” about a brief involvement with what When Harry Met Sally called a “transitional person.” Tangerine oil massages from a madcap woman “who played the banjo, smoked DuMauriers and wore a head-scarf” loosen up the narrator’s shoulders, which were cramped by the trauma of his ex-wife’s affair with “a factory equipment evaluator.”

Richardson does not limit himself to the personal. He can write with chilling accuracy about a damselfly eating a deerfly or about the life of “An Imperial Aide (432 A. D.).” The book has some filler near the end, like a tedious poem reworking an anecdote about Deputy Sanchez and Sheriff Hidalgo from a Cormac McCarthy novel. And the “Letter to Our Psychic Mr. Fixit” is an exceedingly long missive to a eccentric handyman who reads Ellery Queen, Madam Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Nostradamus while coping with a broken heart. The poem has one very amusing detail: the mystic Gurdjieff supported himself as a student by selling sparrows painted yellow as canaries. The irony at the expense of this eccentric is long and forced. But most of Richardson’s book carries valuable cargo. mRb