Though for years an admirer of her tough-minded, elegant lyricism, I admit that when I first picked up Carol Muske-Dukes' newest collection of poems--Sparrow, a book-length elegy for her late husband, the actor David Dukes--I was wary. The title seemed, well, slight for such weighty subject matter, and I didn't relish the prospect of page after page of personal grief for a man whose life I knew of incidentally at best. My initial skepticism, however, was quickly and irrevocably disarmed--no small measure of the book's carefully staged, quietly devastating effect. While it is deeply personal, Sparrow is also an intricate marriage of dramatic and lyric voices, grief so acutely rendered it prefigures centuries of love and loss.

Strangely enough, "prefigures" is the word of choice, though David Dukes--star of stage and screen (notably, Dawson's Creek) and widely known for having played the man who raped Edith Bunker--died in October 2000 while filming the TV movie Rose Red just down the highway in Lakewood, Washington. He was playing tennis, and suffered a heart attack. Carol Muske-Dukes, who is also a novelist, was in Los Angeles working on her third novel, Life After Death, in which the husband of the protagonist dies of a heart attack on a tennis court. Such an intimate, awful tangle of language and fate might permanently disable some writers. But, on the evidence of Sparrow, Muske-Dukes finds in words a resilient, tender, sometimes terrifying faith, "drawing the sky into one extended/remembrance of a present." By writing her way back through the specific details of her husband's death, she arrives at those elemental sources of character and identity--"Dark/light of the sprung soul"--and that "'sense of loss' that predicated everything."

As such, Sparrow reads in reverse, from present to past, from the mundane afterlife of survival to the god-haunted flash of antiquity, plunging into theatrical history as it goes, supported by a cast of excerpts, lines from those dramatis personae David Dukes played throughout his career:

After his death, I kept an illusion before me:

that I would find the key to him, the answer,

in the words of a play that he'd put to heart...

Keenly aware of, and continually startled or disappointed by, the distinction between role and reality, Muske-Dukes comes to depend on the actor's prescribed textual history, though she reads it more as a Book of the Infinite than a Book of Fate. The props and tropes of the theater give her grief its frame and nomenclature, yield up layers of emotion and illusion to cut through or weigh against the hard fact of absence, all while enacting those tricks language plays with memory, simultaneously conjuring and erasing: "A new person, I connect hope & despair:/I connect nothing with nothing." One hears the echo of Lear, who predicts all too well how "nothing will come of nothing." Or of Hamlet: "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow."

By turns classical and colloquial, she offers far more than laminated sentiment, version after version of lament. Take the poem "A Private Matter," constructed in part out of lines from various contemporary roles clipped serendipitously from notecards the actor left behind: Even as she splices the roles and lines together into the crisscross of conversations one hears in, say, a cafe, thereby "emptying the pockets of my own monologues," she has convened the chorus of our communal longing--that aching, primitive demi-urge to identify with another that is, in life as in literature, our restless second nature. It is there in the love-struck lyrics of Sappho, in the furious rumblings of Catullus, the Roman whose "sparrow" poems form one pillar of her allusive endeavor. It is there in Beckett, too, whose Godot will never come, whose Vladimir resounds in David Dukes' discontinuous voice, "Astride the grave, a difficult birth.... " By meditation and estranged ventriloquism, Muske-Dukes avails herself of every means to keep that history of losses alive.

This, in the end, is the book's achievement. It makes of one man's dying a mirror of human history, a memento mori of "passion's glass." "I want to know the difference between love and grief," she asserts, and we are all implicated in the quest.

Carol Muske-Dukes is the last reader in this spring's Seattle Arts & Lectures Poetry Series, which has, in just a few short years, established itself as one of the best venues in town to hear big-name poets ply their trade. After the pithy storytelling of Ellen Bryant Voigt, the lilting, urbane wit of Paul Muldoon, and the metaphysical folklore of Charles Wright, Muske-Dukes' fierce, elegiac tenderness should make a fitting finale. In the publicly intimate, metaphorically resonant ambience of ACT's theater-in-the-round, Sparrow will seem especially sad and bright.

Carol Muske-Dukes talks about her life and work at ACT Theatre (Seventh Ave and Union St, 621-2230) at 7:30 pm on Tues April 20; $14. Kevin Craft teaches writing in Everett and in Rome.