M. Juster’s collection of Petrarch translations, Longing For Laura, sings with a grace that belies the strictures of the sonnet form. In it, poems written before Petrarch’s countryman bumped into the New World on his way to Cathay sound as natural to American English as if they were homegrown.

In The Secret Language of Women Juster’s supple, melodious verse finds subjects far less remote than an idealized woman of the middle ages. Not that he restricts his vision entirely to the local. There are poems translated from Chinese, from Petrarch’s Italian, from Latin, from French; there are venues as diverse as the Moscow zoo, L. Frank Baum’s Oz, and outer space. But whatever the source or location, nearly every one of these poems offers the pleasure of turns that astound the reader with something unexpectedly apt. Here, for example, is “Moonlit”:

Trapped atoms fuse, relenting to vast force.
They shed a beam of light
that touches dust just minutes from its source,
then angles back through night.

Ricocheting within the restless air,
it skims a swaying tree,
then glances off her light and wreckless hair
to leave its ghost with me.

This may be the ultimate lover’s conceit. The forces of nuclear fusion in the sun, the vast distances of outer space, the fortuitously high albedo of the moon, and all those intervening angles and bounces, like a game of cosmic pool—what is it all but a way of illuminating the loved one to the lover’s delight? In fact, it conspires to illuminate merely a few strands of hair. The poet’s vision rushes us through a dizzying sequence of tightening focus, from the cosmic to the cosmetic. Of course, these vast and impersonal forces are also the occasion of the lover’s song, as if he means to impress his sweetheart with his ability to make the solar system center upon her; perhaps he means for the beauty of his poem to rival her beauty. Certainly the music of “touches dust” and “Ricocheting . . . restless,” and the play on “glances” and “light” is as memorable as the scene itself.

An emotional leap almost as long as the one from the sun to a lover’s hair carries us from this tender scene to “ On Remembering Your Funeral Was Today.” If from the title we expect an elegy, Juster’s first lines quickly set us straight: When first I swore to tap-dance on your grave, / My oath was neither wit nor metaphor.” In “Moonlit” we saw how interplanetary distances are no match for a lover’s devotion; in this poem we see that the gap between life and death cannot defeat deep enmity. “Don’t think your death prevents an evened score,” the poet warns. Just as in “Moonlit” the poem itself in expressing love also embodied love, here the poem itself becomes not merely an expression of hatred but a gesture of it. The hell to which the poet is sure his enemy has gone can offer no torment greater then that of being remembered in lines like these:

I bet by now that you have stolen time
To edit The Beginner’s Guide to Hell.

I trust you’ve cheated Charon of a dime
And somehow brought a blush to Jezebel.

These are but two of the many delights in The Secret Language of Women. The centerpiece of the book, though, is the title poem, nearly a hundred stanzas of blank verse in (mostly) iambic pentameter, about a courtesan to a Chinese emperor. Having left the life of a peasant, she finds herself unfulfilled by “silken garments” and by feasts “of camel humps, exotic fish, and boar”:

“Idleness isn’t happiness,” she thinks.
She misses rhythms in her daily chores,
The signs that weather is about to change,
The harmonies of farmhands coming home.

For a few jars of wine that she saved from a feast she buys blank scrolls on which she attempts to express herself in verse. Her life of ennui is interrupted by attempted coups, intrigues, and rumors of barbarian incursions at the fringes of the empire. Lest her poetry reveal anything of her inner life, she destroys much of it and then, when she writes more, memorizes innocuous paeans to the emperor to recite to any curious (but most likely illiterate) investigator.

When the emperor flees she accompanies his ragged retinue, her scrolls concealed inside her robe. Her life at court has not prepared her for the rigors of flight, however, and at a river crossing she gives up, allowing herself to be left behind. With the last of her strength she steals a raft and escapes downstream. Taken in by a farm couple, “She gladly trades her robes for peasant clothes / And ties her hair back in a simple knot.”

A new regime comes to power. The communists, “preening” with their ideology, enforce ignorance no less than the emperor did, even echoing the proverb “The safest woman is a silent one.” Yet for the former courtesan silence is impossible. She not only continues to compose, but she begins as well to teach other women the secrets of written language, of verse. Finally, as Mao’s iron grip begins to loosen, a scholar from America comes to preserve the poetry that has survived by such a tenuous strand of good fortune.

Like all fine poems, "The Secret Language of Women" transcends any paraphrase. Juster incorporates recurring images and phrases, unexpected turns, and lapidary lines to make the poem as lovely from line to line as the woman’s ideographs must have been. “She learns as fast as fawns first hearing dogs,” Juster writes, and, later, “She learns obscurity is no defense.”

The Secret Language of Women would be a fine book even without the title poem; with it, it is a tour de force. This 2002 recipient continues the high standards established by the Richard Wilbur Award.