There's a distinctly incantatory quality to Gerald Stern's verse. Not that there's anything high-falutin' about it. This isn't the chant of a high priest so much as the rhythmic riffing of a master jive-talker.

That's why, when you read Stern's poems, it's a good idea not to stop if you don't get something, or get stuck on the syntax. Just read the poem to the end, then read the next one and keep on reading until you get to the end of the book.

Then go back and read the ones that gave you a bit of trouble. You'll find you have little or no difficulty with any of them the second time around.

John Stuart Mill famously distinguished between eloquence and poetry by pointing out that eloquence is meant to be heard, whereas poetry gives you the feeling that it's being overheard.

It's the difference between a speech and a soliloquy.

But Stern's poems aren't soliloquies so much as carefully transcribed trains of thought, complete with all the leaps and gaps such are likely to display. As he says in "Dream III":

Another good reason to just read Stern's poems, one after another without pause, is that it lets you become acquainted and grow comfortable with certain key images. Shoes, for instance.

These are first mentioned in "Thom McCann," the title referring to the Thom McAn shoe-store chain of the 1940s and '50s, where your could "put your feet in an X-ray machine and thereby / not only get cancer and not only get fitted up / with the perfect pair of shoes," but could also "mourn how thin your bones looked ... how huge your feet were ... and how it was / inevitable the limping, it was called / the breaking in ..."

But Stern has more to say than that about shoes. Toward the end of "Rapture Lost," telling of "the burlesque house on Diamond Street I spent / my tenth grade in," he mentions "he of the baggy pants ... with shoes three sizes too large, a pillow for glut." (Pittsburgh-born Stern was referring to Jaffe's Casino Theater.)

Earlier, the poem "Glut" had begun: "The whole point was getting rid of glut."

"What Then," the poem immediately following "Rapture Lost," elaborates the metaphor:

Stern knows his shoes -- "I sold them at Baker's and Burt's / and carried the boxes on high" -- but he also knows that few items of everyday use better symbolize the travails men and women face on the path of life than the footwear they don every morning. A homely symbol, to be sure, but all the more touching -- and revealing -- for that (think of that "split tongue").

What holds Stern's work together, both the individual poems and the collection as a whole, is its idiosyncratic tone and turns of phrase, at once demotic and prophetic, a kind of plaintive hectoring.

In "The Preacher," a riff on Ecclesiastes that forms Part III of the book and takes the form of a dialogue between Stern and fellow poet Peter Richards, Stern says, "you will / have to forgive my vengeance, what I learned / I learned with a vengeance."

"It comes out as anger," Peter replies, "you can rage."

And so he can. In fact, the impression one gets of the person behind the voice speaking these poems is of anything but a sweetie pie. Rather a crank, really, not exactly likable, though in a goofy sort of way kind of lovable. But above all, and most impressively, down-to-earth and real.