New Hampshire readers who pick up former Portsmouth Poet Laureate John Perrault's recently published collection may find themselves flashing on a mental image of our state symbol tumbling from its mountainside. "Here Comes the Old Man Now" actually contains no direct references to the Old Man of the Mountain, though. (Perhaps like Mt. Fuji in Hokusai's woodcuts, it's an assumed presence.) The title poem, and much of the book, is about succumbing to gravity of a more personal kind.

The book is divided into four parts introduced by epigraphs. The first, from a French troubadour, serves its purpose admirably, setting the tone for what follows. "It is worthless to write a line/ if the song proceed not from the heart," goes the translation, and Perrault clearly heeds this counsel in the 14 poems about his family that comprise the first section. In poems about his parents, such as "Here Comes the Old Man Now" and "Airing Out the Upstairs," the theme is not just of their passage into old age and death, but of the poet recognizing his advancement into their vacated roles and spaces: "...I swear/ it's his smell on this neck. His sweat running down these arms."

There are some nice visual moments in these poems-a thrown shadow seen as "a long dark robe to put on," finches "lighting up the leaves," a dream figure "white/ against the black shore." The emphasis on visuals, seeming to eclipse a concern for musicality, initially surprised me, considering Perrault is also known on the Seacoast as a singer/songwriter. But in fact a song's words aren't what make it musical; it's the melody that provides rhythm, depth, meaning and cadence. If a poem is to sing, the language itself must sing, through a careful, conscious marriage of diction and lineation. If lavish words are employed, they tend to sit most comfortably in longer lines, where their effect is muted and contextualized. Perrault tends to pursue the opposite course, with simple language amplified, through emphasis, by shorter lines: "There is a row boat/ in this dream of mine-/ I'm in the stern,/ we're heading out,// the rower's face turned/ eastward, to line/ the spindles up."

Short-lined poems are often described as "spare" or "lean," and at their best they are. For short lines to work, there has to be a palpable tension maintained throughout, a tone and rhythm established from the get-go and upheld; if a reader's expectations are thwarted, they must be thwarted to a purpose. (A friend, and a great teacher, once put it to me this way: "Despite the evidence in poetry journals today, just chopping up prose has never made a poem anyone but the poet wanted to read twice.")

Perrault's "Row Your Boat," from which the lines above are taken, is one of the more satisfying of his poems due to its thread of tension, with the drama that provides. The lines are also tight in the nicely titled "The Married Males of Dublin Face an Ordination," which appears in Part II. Technically, this is the strongest poem by far, with "Tomatoes" a near tie. Too many others start strong ("First Christmas with the Girls Gone") or end strong ("I Like It"), or have strong moments, but fall short overall. "After the Biopsy," for example, is lovely throughout its first three stanzas-physical, intimate, delicate; it would be a near-perfect poem, if only it ended there.

The highlight of my reading experience was the first stanza of "First Christmas": "I come home,/ eat figs and nuts and will not talk,/ pour a scotch,/ walk around the den." This is tight, rhythmic, evocative yet understated, the kind of writing that makes a reader sit up and take notice, unlike the six sentimental stanzas that follow. The weakest poem in the collection, also for its sentimentality, is "Gift"; in feeling and structure it reads like a Hallmark card and proves the need a poet has for a prudent editor (and proofreader-Robert Bly's name gets misspelled in the fourth epigraph).

Part II of the book is a bit of a world tour, much less personal, set in South America, France, Ireland, St. Lucia and an unidentified Arab land; Part III moves back toward the personal, though indirectly-the gaze is turned on the natural world; and Part IV returns to the narrator's present and the life to be lived, a life of lustiness and optimism. The final poem, "Dessert," couches regret for the brevity of human existence in a lighthearted extended metaphor. While possibly distracting hungry readers with its imagery (I found myself longing for blackberry pie), it succeeds in quickening the spirits as well as the appetite. It's well placed, in that respect, resolving the anxiety in the opening poems and suggesting that Perrault's next book could be something to savor.