The deft formalism of this collection, combined with a lively eye for detail, makes White Crane Spreads Wings a pleasure. Though intimate or personal subjects may be treated, each of the poems here is allowed to work, like a Chinese painting, with a minimum of interference by the author.

In “Times My Mother Wasn’t Going to Die,” the poet offers up a bravely tragicomic series of memory vignettes from which emerges the portrait of a woman living as well as dying. A childhood visit to the father’s workplace – a locomotive plant – forms the basis of “Pintsch Compression Company Tour,” the baroque terrors of which set the child’s mind spinning (and the adult’s remembering sadly).

There are also the humorous observations of “Mysteries of Everyday Life”; the lyrical swelling of “Casey Quinn’s Beatitudes”; and “Toward the River,” a poem on the suicide of the poet John Berryman. There is also a suite on the life of Robert Johnson, the blues guitar master, executed skillfully, if in a slightly strained Southern black dialect. All are strong when something concrete is before the poet, but the vitality that happily characterizes Hyland’s writing can run to cleverness when the poems range to metaphysical subjects, as in the Rochester-like “nothing.”

The chief delight here, however, is the masterful poem that shares the book’s title. It concerns the woman Mai-Lan Li who at length escapes the brutality of her husband and finds peace through tai chi ch’uan, the Chinese art of meditation and self-defence. Parallel to the main story is a folk tale that Mai-Lan tells her daughter Min in nightly installments. As the two tales unfold, rage and abuse are defeated by an act as quiet and perfect as a crane rising into the air. As he shows in his other poems, Hyland does have a real feel for traditional Chinese poetry, and for rendering its plaintive moods (and its formal values of simplicity and clarity) in English.