What readers miss in most contemporary poetry is the sense of an ending, a conclusion to thought, a culminating cadence that leaves them higher than they began. Meredith is one of the few poets writing today who can exalt, and he does so through wit.

"The cheer, / reader my friend, is in the words here, somewhere. / Frankly, I'd like to make you smile," he announces in an envoi to [The Cheer,] a collection that contains all his short poetry of the last ten years…. Meredith believes in civilization, in society with all its corruptions…. So he celebrates the random orderings of society by speaking, paradoxically, of land, stone, trees, and, very often, rivers. He enters the paddock of society, the family, the state, without ever losing a sense of the feral realities outside it.

Poems in The Cheer, unlike those in many books of poetry, are addressed to...