The Headless Saints

""The radio buried in sand is language,"" one poem early in Hardy's second book begins, and the pages that follow include broadcasts from all over the world. Bred in Arkansas, now based in New York City, the poet finds terse lines and pithy symbols in cityscapes, seascapes and inland scenes from Venice and Turin, ""Somalia or Ethiopia,"" ""Bahia, Brazil,"" in shantytowns, world capitals, and flood zones. ""Seaweed circles legs but will not pull/ another body under,"" he observes in ""The Living""; ""This time it drags// a living man to shore."" Hardy's scenes sometimes stand for the African diaspora, for the survivals and triumphs of the descendants of slaves; often they show the meanings and the links art creates among people who seem dissimilar, as in a poem about the meeting between Abel Meeropol, who wrote the words to ""Strange Fruit,"" and Billie Holiday, who made the song famous. Sometimes the poems stop short, or say no more than their subjects let readers predict; at others, their terse vigor reinvents what they see. Hardy looks not so much at what photographers or travel writers might include as at the shapes of the lives he can find, or imagine: even amid natural disasters, as in ""Tornado,"" ""coffins/ close,"" ""bodies break"" and ""rise invisible souls.""