HOWDIE-SKELPBy Paul Muldoon179 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

Howdie-skelp: the slap a midwife gives a newborn. Poem-sequences dominate Muldoons storm of slaps against piety, prudery, cruelty and greed. American Standard, named after a toilet brand, riffs for pages on lines from T. S. Eliots The Waste Land while churning through contemporary concerns like gerrymandering, immigration, and grotesque politicians and their media platforms. Like Eliot, Muldoons after big, apocalyptic vision; unlike Eliot, Muldoon is willing no, compelled to clown.

In one long sequence Muldoon dives into the human ook that underlies great paintings. His bawdiness is political. Muldoons version of Leonardos Last Supper pictures the tablecloth as Mary Magdalenes bedsheet, the crease in it A gutter filled with candle grease. / The semen stain where Judas spilled his salt. Like many important poets before him, from John Milton to Tim Rice, Muldoon knows that sinners and villains are more interesting, maybe more human, than self-appointed good guys. Poems, for Muldoon, are occasions to plumb the language for a truth thats abysmal: as in appalling, and as in deep. Its clear that underneath the play Muldoon is furious, maybe even terrified, about the state of things.

PLAYLIST FOR THE APOCALYPSEPoemsBy Rita Dove114 pp. Norton. $26.95.

Plenty of poems here address disability, history and quotidian human behavior, but racism and economic oppression are the former poet laureates primary concerns in this book, her first in 12 years. In Aubade West, set in Ferguson, Mo., the speaker might be Michael Brown or anyone subject to poverty and racism in a small town. A day just like all the others, / me out here on the streets / skittery as a bug crossing a skillet. In less fraught poems, Doves affable voice occupies a tonal middle distance. I love the hour before takeoff, / that stretch of no time, no home, she writes in Vacation, observing a bachelorette trying / to ignore a babys wail, and an athlete waiting to board like a seal trained for the plunge. The poem doesnt lift off, and doesnt want to after all, the passengers are still at the gate. But Bellringer, the books first poem, certainly does. Here Dove assumes the voice of Henry Martin, born to slavery at Monticello the day Thomas Jefferson died, who worked as a bellringer at the University of Virginia. Voiced by Dove, Martin imagines that, hearing his bells ring, down in that/ shining, blistered republic, /someone will pause to whisper / Henry!and for a moment / my name flies free. A fitting way to start a book trying to understand saving graces and the things they save us from.

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PROGNOSISPoemsBy Jim Moore102 pp. Graywolf. Paper, $16.

I am still so very thirsty, ends one poem in Prognosis. Moore is preoccupied with old age, loneliness, mortality, and also with the American body politics own failure. These are poems of arresting lyric reportage; whimsical, tragic, a touch fantastical. Watching from a window in The Pandemic Halo the poet notices a glow appearing around the nurse who wears a pink cape and parks / in the lot across from me, almost always empty now.

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Five Poets Who Find Music in the Personal, the Political or in Music Itself - The New York Times