"National Anthem" by Kevin Prufer; Four Way Books ($15.95)

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The poems in Kevin Prufer's "National Anthem" may seem to be a startling change from the image-haunted verses of childhood memory and loss in his first collection ("Strange Wood," 1997), but they mark an inevitable evolution - from image to narrative.

If the multilayered poems in "The Finger Bone" (2002) and "Fallen From a Chariot" (2005) are forerunners of an increasing emphasis upon story as well as image, the poems in "National Anthem" may be an arrival point: a gathering of images presented in a narrative voice.

In "Apocalypse," the collection's first poem, "a breath of newspapers," blowing past, sets the scene; "I'll tell you a story," the narrator promises, "to make you stop crying for a minute." And the narrative moves, with dark certainty, toward the image of the "body of a girl long decayed" in a tree's low branch: "The sockets of her eyes" are "little caves for birds."

In the following poem, "We Wanted to Find America," the image is "snow ... thick and clotted on the windshield, sleet falling like frozen pilots, / their legs shattering in the crowded streets." And the narrator sees "office towers bending down to us as if they'd cup us in their hands and warm us, / as if they'd lift us from the street before we froze."

In "Ars Poetica" the narrator confides, "I've written love notes all my life ... I do not know to whom ... , / dropped from my fingers into gutters / so someone might find them and smile." He adds: "Useless notes ... / while the empire closed."

The title poem begins: "And the shopping center said, Give me, give me. / And the moon turning on its pole said, I love you, you who have so much to give." The narrative voice muses: "Sometimes I can hear the nation speak through the accumulation of the suburbs - / Olive Garden and Exxon; Bed, Bath & Beyond, the stars that throw their dimes around us all / until the eyes say, Love and the streets say, Yes! and the parking lot / fills with angels blowing past the lines of freezing cars."

"The Fall of Rome," the narrator tells us, searching for a comparison, "Comes like a hammer to a window, a thin crash." But at the poem's closure, he concludes, "It is only a shell. / It is only a wing that has stopped against the body, in the cold. / I can put so many names to it, none of them good. / It would be best if it had no wings at all."

In the last poem in the collection, "Dying Bird," the narrator gathers his poetry of images into one final story. The bird "fell into the chimney's throat / into the house, where I ... was reading ... / The bird lay on the hearth / and wouldn't move. Its wings traced / an arc in the soot. I watched / for a long time, but never touched it."

Marie Howe has written of Kevin Prufer: "... from deep inside here and now, from within the American Empire, he is listening to the memory of the future. He has courage and compassion. And he places words so beautiful and accurate and terrifying along a line you can't help but read to the end."

The workmanship in these poems in "National Anthem" - indeed, the workmanship in the poems in Prufer's three earlier collections - certainly validate that judgment.