If you go south of Hollywood on LaBrea and turn east on West 3rd Street, you will travel through the heart of Hancock Park, an L.A. neighborhood built in the 1920s to accommodate the needs of non-Hollywood nabobs, like the Getty family. The street passes by massive English Tudor mansions with odd Spanish Colonial addenda, a beautiful golf course and occasional LaLa Land eccentricities (the mini-villa, for instance, with the 17 life-size reproductions of Michelangelo's David lining the driveway). On this overcast May morning, the jacaranda and magnolia trees are in full bloom along the side streets.

Poet and novelist Carol Muske-Dukes lives in the Windsor Square section of this neighborhood, in a pied-à-terre that does not, as it happens, particularly allude to the reign of King Henry VIII or the Spanish conquest of Granada. Her dogs clamor at the gate when PW shows up, but become a friendly welcoming committee when Muske-Dukes appears.

This must be an eerie season for the writer. On the bright side, her latest book, Life After Death (Forecasts, Apr. 23), an elegantly written novel of manners, will surely be well received this summer. The story centers on a St. Paul, Minn., woman, Boyd Schaeffer, whose 42-year-old husband, Russell, drops dead of a heart attack. She goes back into medicine and starts an awkward romance with a funeral home director. The book is full of marvelous throwaway pieces, prose poems of a sort. Here's Freddy, Boyd and Russell's daughter, on the playground with a book, after shooing away a playmate who smells:

"Freddy returns to her consideration of the tree and her letters, safe in her milieu. To her right, near the aquarium, grim, asthmatic Felicia batters pegs into holes, wheezing and grunting. They are all in place, all the categories and predictable social types that she will meet and remeet throughout her life. The Aggressor throwing blocks, the Whiner sobbing in his wet plast pants, the Seducers, he and she tossing their curls, the Good Citizen preparing to report to the Teacher."

Favorable criticism might cast a retrospective glow of interest over Muske-Dukes's two previous novels, Dear Digby (Viking, 1989) and Saving St. Germ (Viking, 1993), the last of which was a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Both were published to critical acclaim, but neither achieved more than modest popular success.

The dark side is hinted at in the novel's dedication: "For David, who gave me constant love and encouragement in writing this book since 1994—and whom I lost on October 9, 2000." "David" is David Dukes, her husband, the actor who starred in television (The Winds of War), theater (Bent) and film (The First Deadly Sin). After Muske-Dukes had completed the book, her husband unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died. It was a cruel coincidence, an instance of what Thomas Hardy called "satires of circumstance," that Boyd's fictional trauma was visited on her author.

Muske-Dukes (who uses the simple "Muske" for her poetry) has been a recognized figure in the literary world since her first volume of poems, Camouflage, came out from University of Pittsburgh Press in 1975. Since then her poetry has garnered her major recognition in the poetry world and the prizes and grants that go with it. She was at the epicenter of the feminist surge in poetry in the '70s and '80s. But her roots are in the tradition-bound Great Plains.

Her grandfather was "a Separator Man/ harvesting the wheat/ in Wyndmere." Wyndmere is a town in North Dakota, where her mother's family still owns land. "Back in the Great Depression they were land rich, but poor. My mother was a frustrated poet. She got a scholarship, but the family couldn't afford to have her go to college. So she married my father and had a family, but she always had a great store of poetry she'd memorized. I remember she would insert these asides into her bits, like 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds—put your dishes in the sink—admit impediments.' I remember it would puzzle me coming upon these poems and thinking, hey, where's the part about putting the dishes in the sink?"

More seriously, Muske-Dukes appreciates the act of memorizing poetry, which used to be a standard element of the teaching curriculum, as a way of "embodying the poem." "Joseph Brodsky," she says, "who was teaching at Columbia when I was also teaching there, used to have his graduate students memorize poems. Brodsky was the kind of poet who committed poems to heart naturally—he learned English by memorizing poetry—out of great love."

"I became one of those insufferable kids who are encouraged to produce poems on all occasions" is the way Muske-Dukes wryly sums up her early writerly drive. When she went to Creighton, a Jesuit college in Nebraska, and then to San Francisco State, she already knew, in a sense, what she wanted to do. "I wasn't very hip when I left Creighton. I just walked into the whole San Francisco scene. I took a course in directed reading under Kay Boyle. (You know, I like saying this whenever I can. Kay Boyle should be part of the canon, along with her modernist brothers.) I got my degree, went to Europe, and even played in Hair in Paris. Then I went to live in New York."

Muske-Dukes wrote about the poetic and political moment in New York in an autobiographical essay in her essay collection, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self (1997): "When I arrived in New York City in 1971, I joined consciousness-raising groups, but I found it impossible to express my own sense of conflict. I eventually sought out women in prison, because their isolation and extremity reflected a dislocation I felt in my own life and writing."

"I was really inspired at San Francisco State by Kathleen Fraser, who electrified me when she read Plath's 'Daddy,' " Muske-Duke says. "Fraser seemed to be able to be both a poet and live an ordinary life. I didn't see how I could do that myself. In addition to that, the public world of poetry then was controlled by men—as it still is. What I thought would help was teaching in the Riker's Island prison, and so I was going between two enclosed places—I was teaching at Columbia, and at Riker's. Eventually I set up, through the National Endowment for the Arts, a program for this, 'Art Without Walls.' "

If her political side was active at the time, her poetry was also becoming known. "My first book was published because I'd entered these poems in a contest. I didn't win the contest—a Thomas Rabbit did. But they had enough money, they could afford to publish two books, so they published Camouflage."

In 1981, she went to live in Italy on a Guggenheim grant, and there she met David Dukes, in highly romantic circumstances. "I rented a house in Barbarino Val d'Elsa, outside of Florence. A beautiful house built into an ancient Etruscan wall. My friend, Jorie Graham [the poet], was in Italy then, too. Her mother, Beverly Pepper, is world renowned for her heavy metal sculptures. Her father, Bill, is an author and journalist. They own a castle in Todi, which they built from ruins of a 12th-century fortification and tower, the Castella Torre Olivola.

"Okay. Jorie's brother, John, was an assistant director on the television miniseries, The Winds of War, which was shooting in Florence when I was there. Among the cast was a friend of John's—David Dukes—who was coming over to see John at his parents' place. Since Jorie had invited me to come, too, the plan was that David would pick me up in Florence and we would drive down there together. Of course, it was a setup. We drove down there, and imagine this place, with Beverly's sculptures surrounding the grounds like brooding sentinels. Jorie and I talk about poetry, John and David talk about acting. David was trained as a Shakespearean actor, he knew the classical repertoire, Molière to Chekhov. Now, who wouldn't fall in love in those circumstances?"

Muske-Dukes shows me an album of photos of these places she made for her sixth wedding anniversary. It ends with a clip from Liz Smith's gossip column, announcing the marriage of David Dukes and Carol Muske, and a news picture of the bride and groom, looking radiantly happy.

In the early '80s, Muske-Dukes was starting to write fiction. Her first novel, Dear Digby, started as an epistolary goof. "I was supposed to co-write that with a friend, who was actually in the letters department at Ms. magazine." The friend dropped out of the project, but Muske-Dukes continued. "The letter format was really helpful for me just starting out in fiction, because it gave a natural flow to my chapters—you end a letter, or you begin one, and that provides a way of swimming from one piece of text to another." The novel is about a Lonely Hearts—style columnist at SIS, a feminist magazine. Digby radiates a sort of combination of the ingenue humor of Gracie Allen and the in-your-face feminism of the early Gloria Steinem. "I didn't have an agent at the time. A friend showed the manuscript to Viking, and they bought it. So I scrambled to find an agent." The book was received with critical enthusiasm and optioned, by Michelle Pfeiffer, for a movie. "It was green-lighted by Orion, but they couldn't get their screenplay together. At one point Callie Khouri—who later did Thelma and Louise—wanted to do it, but they turned her down." Her second novel, Saving St. Germ, in 1993, reflected her move to Southern California. By this time, she was teaching creative writing at USC, in the same department as T. C. Boyle. The novel is about a scientist, Esme Charbonneau, who makes a brilliant but highly technical discovery in physics.

'That novel came out of reading a very beautiful novel by Charles Baxter, First Light. I fell in love with that book, which is about a woman who is an astrophysicist, who has a deaf child. Baxter is great at showing how the child enters the world in a different way that really captured my imagination. I knew I couldn't just cop his idea, but I decided I'd write about a chemist who wants to be a cosmologist." That she would have to use a whole different vocabulary did not seem daunting. "I like the vocabularies of other disciplines. I had an interesting experience when I was researching this book, because I went to a scientist at USC with various questions, and before he explained things to me, he asked me, what level of calculus do you have? Or trigonometry? Or algebra? And I kept shaking my head. So he said, I'm going to have to use lay language? And it turned out that when he used 'lay' language, he started giving me metaphors and analogies—as you would get, notoriously, in poetry." In the book, Esme's life comes apart as she tries to develop a purely theoretical insight into the origin of the universe. "I got some odd reactions to that book. A scientist from San Diego told me that I was doing a disservice to women in science by showing this woman as unstable. I tried to explain that it was fiction." Saving St. Germ was also published by Viking.

Her current novel was inspired by Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. "I thought I might do something in a comic vein like that. So in St. Paul, I talked to funeral home directors. But the satiric impulse in the novel petered out as I got more interested in Boyd. Now that David has died, I have more perspective on her. I think maybe I didn't allow Boyd to be as shocked—as traumatized—as she would have been. This novel had nothing to do with David. He was pyrotechnically active, and you simply wouldn't have suspected that he had advanced coronary artery disease."

She has nothing but praise for her new publisher, Random House, who will also be publishing her book of essays, Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood, next year. She likes it that her editor there, Daniel Menaker, is an author himself. When Random House took her novel, she was between agents. On the recommendation of Menaker, she went to Molly Friedrich, who has "been more than good, she's been a source of strength, a real friend." Muske-Dukes is also pleased with the look of the novel, which features, on its cover, a reproduction of a painting by the Flemish master Joachim Patinir, Charon Crossing the Styx, showing a gigantic ferryman of death steering a pale, dwindled, suppliant figure across a glassy sheet of water to a shore upon which a signal fire, or funeral pyre, has been lit. The painting complements not only this novel, with its subtly woven tension between the transitions of everyday life and the aura of myth, but also the striving in her work to understand the emotional tug produced by the stubborn particularity, the finitude, of objects and persons. As she put it in a poem in Red Trousseau: The rest of it, you see,/ is my work: slowing the mind's quick progress/ from the hypnotic of that startled world/ to the empty solicitation of metaphor/ the loathsome poetic moment."