POET'S CHOICE, by Edward Hirsch, Harcourt, 432 pages, $25.

In the elegant and precious "Poet's Choice," Edward Hirsch, a prominent poet, critic and educator, uses the work of 130 different poets to illustrate to the average reader how to appreciate diverse pieces of poetry.

The book is based on Hirsch's three-year tenure as Washington Post columnist on poetry.

To illustrate his interest in international poetry, Hirsch scoured the world for high-level, gifted poets and found them in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and America, from ancient times to the present. Using 9/11 as a prescient hook, Hirsch argues that "poetry responds to suffering."

Poetry, he writes, "is a means of exchange, a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift. There has never been a civilization without it. . . . I consider poetry — which is, after all, created out of a mouthful of air — a human fundamental, like music. It saves something precious in the world from vanishing."

The poetry he loves, writes Hirsch, "has become part of the air I breathe."

Hirsch says Boris Pasternak thought of poetry as "two nightingales dueling." When he told that to the writer William Maxwell, "he said that learning how to sing like nightingales in treetops ought to be a requirement for poets."

Finally, Hirsch quotes Shelly: "A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why."

This book is filled with gems, starting with Gerard Manley Hopkins' 1878 sonnet, "God's Grandeur" and progressing to the Greek masters. Then the author samples the Aztec poets of the 14th and 15th centuries and moves on to W.B. Yeats' mysterious 19th and 20th century poetry.

As clearly explained by Hirsch, Yeats borrowed from others a verse form that "consists of interlocking three-line stanzas rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etc. Rhyming the first and third lines gives each tercet a sense of temporary closure; rhyming the second line with the first and last lines of the next stanza generates a strong feeling of propulsion. The effect is both open-ended and conclusive, like moving through a set of interpenetrating rooms or going down a set of winding stairs; you are always traveling forward while looking back."

Hirsch pauses on the French poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose familiar work he finds "outwardly impersonal, inwardly nervous." Rilke, he says, spent whole days at zoos studying animals, and then wrote about them — panthers and gazelles.

Hirsch also analyzes the familiar Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Robert Pinsky and Robert Penn Warren, but he also goes into depth in consideration of the less familiar Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. He discusses Vietnam poems, baseball and basketball poems, grandparent poems, roller-coaster poems, swimming poems and poems about some of the Bible psalms.

And he ends with poetry about saying goodbye or farewell, seeing people off, taking leave of a friend. It is especially appropriate as, by this time, poetry has become the reader's friend.

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