In the first section of “Five Preludes,” the opening poem of Sharon Thesen’s ninth collection, a woman is caught in a moment of indecision about which hat she should wear when going out. Each of her two options foregrounds a different aspect of herself: “She was a different person in the green hat,” Thesen writes, “more open-minded.” Wearing the grey hat “she had less patience / and a stone sat between her legs.” The hats could serve as a microcosm for the whole of Thesen’s book, a collection of wildly divergent voices and different aspects.

There is the nostalgic, lyrical voice of “Party Nights” and “A Lovely Day,” which recollects, respectively, the childhood excitement of attending adult parties and the speaker’s pleasure in watching her father pitch softball games on long-ago summer nights. There is the romanticized vision of a deceased musician in “Robbie King,” and the mournful tone of “Death in the Moonlight, a Sinking Canoe,” which is dedicated to the poet’s drowned nephew.

Then there are poems like “Interior, Postwar,” which provides snapshots of temporal and psychological postwar settings, but seems infected by vague, lingering threats: a “tenant’s afternoon-shift torso innocently passed by / unshot at”; novelty salt and pepper shakers are “Hitler-Jugend”; the ex-merchant marine with “deep unspoken wounds of battle” sees sunken ships and dead seamen in the placid surface of a birdbath.

Throughout, Thesen alludes to numerous writers (Eliot, Dickenson, Stevens, Auden, and Nin, to name but a few), either by naming them outright or conversing with their work. The Haida figure of Dogfish Woman likewise inhabits the collection, appearing in several poems, a stony-faced figure staring out at an uncertain future from her place in the canoe of Bill Reid’s The Spirit of Haida Gwaii sculpture.

There are many worthy pieces here, but their heterodox nature makes the book as a whole feel less like a collection than a loose grouping of discrete poems.