Poetry Chronicle.

FLIES By Michael Dickman. Copper Canyon. Paper, $16. Frank O'Hara once wrote this, in a poem called ''Poetry'': ''The only way to be quiet / is to be quick, so I scare / you clumsily, or surprise / you with a stab.'' It's an instructive passage, not just because it moves with that conversational, come-bounce-along-with-me rhythm that became O'Hara's signature, but because it's a poem about the odd, lovely jolt we can get from an unexpected line. In a way, O'Hara was going straight at something that has become a core quandary of contemporary poetry: How, in a texting, tweeting age that finds us drowning in freshets of language, do you deliver that stab of surprise? Sometimes, quiet and quick is the savviest course of action. That's what you find in Dickman's ''Flies,'' a hushed book that is nevertheless full of lines like fish breaking the surface of a still pond. ''My mother sits on the floor of her new kitchen carefully feeding the flies from her fingertips,'' Dickman writes, with a Sextonish sense of domestic derangement, in ''False Start.'' ''I want to hold you between my teeth,'' he offers in ''Above Love.'' The opening section of ''Emily Dickinson to the Rescue'' can't be printed in a family newspaper, but believe me, it gets your attention. One of Dickman's poems is called ''Imaginary Playground,'' and that phrase could be used to describe the book itself, which returns again and again to blue, unshakable reveries that explore the strangeness of how childhood actually feels to a child. (Especially, maybe, when you've got a twin brother who will also grow up to be a poet.) Many of them, like ''Dead Brother Superhero,'' derive their force and intimacy from a loss in the poet's own life -- the overdose death of his older brother, Darin Hull -- but they're so deftly calibrated that they manage never to be maudlin. This is only Dickman's second book, but like his twin, Matthew, he already seems a major American talent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]