There are made-up words and there are made up words. Consider "kuboaa," a word invented by the great modern Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and put into the mouth of the starving hero of his masterwork, Hunger. For Hamsun's delirious hero, the word was a pure sound, something outside, even above, the realm of signifying language. Always aware of the absurd, and with a longing after purity that led him into some dark corners of the psyche, Hamsun meant for his "kuboaa" to be a word free from reference. To encounter it was to encounter something alien, something of untainted otherness. You could say "kuboaa" was to be the verbal equivalent of one of Kazimir Malevich's paintings of a red square on a white background: everything familiar was to be left behind in the encounter with the unassimilated and elemental. Kuboaa was the word of the modern primitive, the word of regrounding, of beginning again, outside existing language and away from the freight of civilization.

        John Peck's "argura," is another made-up word, and the title of his fourth volume of poetry. But it is a creature altogether different from kuboaa. As Peck writes in the notes to his Collected Shorter Poems, argura "corresponds to no single Latin word, but rather to elements that derive from roots shared among several terms." This is not the neologism as word-free-of-reference; this is the polyvalent neologism, the word that bears the trace of several meanings, and the weight of several etymologies, but that remains, finally, elusive. When I first turned to Peck's note, I rather wished I'd seen it before ransacking my Latin-English dictionary, but that would, I suppose, have defeated the purpose. How else would I, a man of small Latin and less Greek have come across argentum (silver, or money), argumentum (argument or evidence), and arguro (to make clear, but also to censure or reprove) - all words with relevance to Peck's poetry, and lurking in argura's syllables? The point of a word like "argura" is not to lift the reader up above the trails of signification, but to send the reader down those trails in pursuit of historical and linguistic references. If kuboaa is the word of the modern primitive, argura is the word of the modern classical, sending the reader to the word-horde of Latin antiquity.

        The difference between a word like kuboaa and a word like argura can be taken as a cue on how to read a poet like John Peck, perhaps the most challenging - and one of the most rewarding - American poets of his generation. No primitive, Peck, but a poet whose work twines together classical references, history, and the present, along with references to the canon of Chinese poetry; not with a scholar's rigor, but in search of previously unheard chords and resonances. If this sounds a bit like Ezra Pound, it should: John Peck isn't just a Poundian, he's a fully credentialed, card-carrying Poundian. At Stanford during the sixties Peck was a student of Donald Davie, whose Ezra Pound: The Poet as Scupltor is surpassed only by Hugh Kenner's masterful Pound Era. With Davie as an advisor, Peck spent years writing a doctoral dissertation on Pound's poetry, and Pound's influence can be found everywhere in Peck's work, not least in its learnedness.

        At a time when poetry seems dominated by the banalities of the backyard epiphany, on the one side, and by faux Gertrude Stein nonsense-verse on the other, learnedness is a welcome poetic virtue. This is especially true when it comes off less as pedantry than as a passion of mind, as in Peck's case. But learned allusiveness also presents the reader with some very real problems. Consider, for example, the end of Peck's "Rhyme Prose Three: Chapter of the Nine Rocks," by no means the most obscure passage in his oeuvre:

The one finding his way to me will uncover in my cave the skull of his first similar, and the trickle of saving blood rusting its sutures, and the onset of storm, through eclipse and down-breaking flashings, in the twelfth hour approaching. But he will find too that the crown of my hill presages alternations with the breath of browsing deer I seem to remember from before time, auguring a last great change. He will find the exiled path of the stone.

Saving blood, a crown, a hill, and a "first similar," all gathered into a kind of dream-vision. The genre here isn't free-form prophecy: in fact, the iconography is quite specific, having to do with Christ at Golgotha, and Adam as a prefiguration of Christ. For many of us, this sort of thing is bit of a stretch, especially when mythologies and histories mix and twine together over the course of four hundred pages (I read Peck with pleasure, but also in the corner of my study near the reference books). A poetry like this can be tremendously rich and beautiful, but the problem posed by the density of allusion is a real one. Peck's old mentor Davie, thinking of his own poems, saw the problem clearly when he said "where does one to in one's writing, if the King James Bible has become a recondite source?" (you can almost see him throwing up his hands, almost hear that throaty Yorkshire rumble).

        One answer to Davie's question is that the poet goes to meet the public on its own ground. Imagine a country in which the three-time poet laureate writes an "Ode to Television" praising the wisdom of Oprah Winfrey, and you'll have a pretty clear idea of what such an answer entails for poetry. But Peck answers the question differently. Where the poet goes, for Peck, is deep into his own word-horde, text-horde, myth-and-lore-horde. If that horde (recondite in our amnesiac society) happens to consist of the great texts and events of Western Civilization, as it does in much of Peck's writing, then the poet finds himself in the curious position of seeming both arcane and oddly familiar. Vincent Sherry, writing about John Matthias (another Stanford poet, another poet of bookish allusions), said that the poet "offers from his word-horde and reference-trove the splendid alteirity of unfamiliar speech [that is also] our familial tongue, our own language in its deeper memory and resonance," adding that such a poet "must work, as it were, way out in the center." These words describe Peck as well as they do Matthias, and give a good impression of the substantial pleasures and momentary frustrations involved in reading either poet.

Beyond this business of learnedness, there's a lot more one could say about how Peck rings changes on Poundian poetics. There is, for example, a great deal of Cathay in Peck's third book, Poems and Translations of Hi?-lö. And Peck even manages to out-Ezra Ezra in terms of eleaborate persona: Hi?-lö is, according to Peck's preface, "a Chinese intern in psychosomatics who worked in Zurich during the 1980s and used his writings as a way of understanding the West." One could go on about the genius of this persona, how it allows Peck a cultural outsider's permission to creatively reinterpret and defamiliarize the Western heritage, and how it allows him to mix West and East, finding the rhymes between different cultures. But I am already envisioning Peck grinding his teeth as he reads this review, knowing, as I do, how strongly he objects to my reading of his work as essentially, or at least largely, Poundian. He once wrote to me, saying that "Pound I never was, opinions to the contrary notwithstanding. Round(er) and not Pound(ing), I believe . . . . An open-eyed look at what I've managed to do so far would not lend signal emphasis to Pound's example."

        "Not Pounding" I take to mean less didactic, and Peck certainly is that. There is nothing of the village explainer in him, and you won't encounter any loopy theories about usury and social credit in the Collected Shorter Poems. This is not to say that Peck is blind to the error and arrogance that money brings, though. Having lived for years as a penniless scholar in Zurich, world capital of the fattened wallet, Peck can write wonderfully satiric lines like these, from "A Gross of Poems Linked in the Mixed Manner":

Foam over the rim
after a fast pour,
soulful advice that smacks
of promissory notes.

        With "Rounder," I'm less sure where to go. My sense is that Peck is referring to the way he links image to image, intuitively modulating them into an implicit argument. There is a coherence to Peck's poetry, but it is not the coherence of overly deliberate or rhetorical planning. As Peck puts it in "Ars Poetica," "the irregular stone takes shape, though it derives shape / from the ruled lattice, denuded hegemenous crystal." If I'm right about this, though, I'm not at all sure that this is "rounder" than Pound himself. The very strong poets, critics used to say, misread their predecessors to hide the degree of their beholdeness.

        Peck is at his strongest when he addresses themes of presence and absence, particularly the presence of the apparently absent past. Sometimes he simply finds the rhyme between different histories, with a phrase like "the mines of Nero and the ovens of Frick," say, which links ancient Rome and Peck's native Pittsburgh. At other times, as in "Fog Burning Off at Cape May," one of Peck's finest early poems, Peck dramatizes the moment of epiphany when present and past seem to lay, transparent, one over the other. In this poem we find a man and his family walking through the broken wall of a blockhouse fortification, a relic from the Second World War, when German U-Boats lurked off the coast of New England. The blockhouse is there, in the present, but to enter it is to enter the absent past:

The margin that had gone
Unfired on, the last edge
Behind which houses waited
Without damage -

World to which men returned.
Archaic, it cleared through air
And we had walked into it,
Whole. We were there.

        While Peck's work is often a poetry of allusion and the historical imagination, it should be said that this Collected Shorter Poems exhibits a range of different poetic modes. There are erotic poems, ("your back bends the light with it, / Warmly down and along / the spine's rivulet" writes Peck in "Quiet"); there are satiric and comic poems (such as "A Gross of Poems Linked in the Mixed Manner"); there are poems of political and moral urgency ("The Capital, 1980" reads almost like Robert Lowell); and there are poems that could have appeared in the Imagist anthologies ("Dust runs after the deer / Cloud prints the mountain" ends "Viaticum"). And in the poems collected from Peck's most recent volume, M and Other Poems, we find a poetry that insists not only on the presence and immediacy of the past, but on the need to live fully immersed in the present. In "Woods Burial," a poem that deserves to be known as one of the finest short meditative poems of the nineties, the poet observes a father and son throwing a dead birch tree into the rapids of a river, and says:

If they really knew what history is,
even though they're in it up to their necks,
they'd feel it, the tug, the cold hilt. They'd stand, shiver.

But how much smarter is that? And how am I better?
It is that log I've got to be,
shot straight, unstuck from the banks,
sluicing my wood-lice through the white gates,
hurling home.

        I don't foresee a world in which Peck's readers outnumber those of the laureate who sings the praises of television, but for a small number of readers Peck will always matter tremendously. Be one of them.