The upsurge here is attractive, but the swaggering rhythm and confident “I-I-I” of these lines belie their assertions of humility and lend a false note to the final, self-abnegating declaration of the poem, “Mine is a poor light/and glad to be//continuing.”

If the strength of Richards’ music sometimes undercuts his speakers’ claims of passivity and weakness, it also produces much of beauty. The most solidly gorgeous passages come when a palpable pressure seems to push in on our trapped speaker, as in “The Bird Maker’s Last”:

     For if the Lord wishes me to be a bird
     let his Majesty retract the birds
     and be pleased to recall my obedience
     and the haste I took in his service.

The tidy testimonial cadence is kicked slant by the unusual use of “retract,” the not-quite-Quakerish “haste,” and the quirky theological supposition of the first line. The near rhymes of the final syllables of ‘obedience’ and ‘service’ lend a prayerlike diminuendo that seems unforced. The strange grace of this poem is only lightly marred by the false note of special language struck in its final lines: “It must be Hesitation—a long time/when no one occurs.”

Oubliette achieves success when, as in the passage above, Richards’ fine writing convinces us of the integrity of his visions. Slighter poems, such as “The Moon is a Moon,” a poem that strives only to debunk conventional moon imagery, come off as exercise. Elsewhere, nimble and lovely language cannot shore up what seems like arbitrary, even Poetic, speculation, as in “Nettles”: “How many javelins blunted in violet/pierce open the spheres relieved of their dead?” In what seems like an incongruously novice error, two lines of the nine-line poem “Siphons” are dedicated to the repetition of a single, tenuous image: “Skin on a mountain embarking for sea/The skin on a mountain.”

At other moments, Richards insists on stretching his poems on Ideas that run the language past its mark. The lovely “Unable” picks its way ambivalently through images of fountains and birds to arrive at the exquisite “When I drank from these waters/I drank from my own face—//and an endless wet bird/rose from my throat,” only to hammer the bird useless by concluding “at once wingless/and unable to sing.”

Richards’ weaker choices read like crimes of the poet against his own considerable talent; in this respect, reading Richards can be as maddening as reading early Yeats. This is not faint praise, and the thunderous rising of blurb-clouds off this book suggests an identification with Richards by a wide range of first-rate poets. Is Richards, then, that rare bird, a poet’s poet? Oubliette is a promisingly frustrating book.