RICHARD Michelson of Amherst is well known for his award-winning children's books - eight gems in 10 years, with another on the way. But his literary career actually began two decades ago with poetry.

My passion is art, both visual and writing, said Michelson, who owns R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton and Amherst. 'I love the kids books because it's a melding of pictures and words,' said Michelson. 'But in my soul, there's a guilt over what I'm contributing, as I sit at my desk over a piece of paper, while people around the world are suffering.'

It's in his poetry that Michelson gives voice to his struggles to answer the tug of joy amid the terrors of the wider world, present and past.

Now, 20 years after publication of his poetry debut 'Tap Dancing for the Relatives,' a new collection, 'Battles & Lullabies,' has just been published by the University of Illinois Press. Michelson will read from the book tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Memorial Hall at the University of Massachusetts, sharing the podium with poet Chase Twichell.

The book's cover bears a painting by the late Leonard Baskin, with whom Michelson collaborated on two fine-press editions of his poetry, 'Semblant' and 'Masks.' On the back, comments from fellow poets include this from former U.S. poet laureate Richard Wilbur of Cummington:

'The poems of this book ask with urgent eloquence how the sweetness of life can be sheltered from the terrors of our time, and what art can make of such a world as ours. Michelson's poems are artful, humane and true.'

Tender domestic tales

Two of five sections, the first and the last, look at family life through eyes much like Michelson's own, as a Jewish man who grew up in Brooklyn and learned to count from the five numbers burned into the arm of his grandmother, a concentration camp survivor.

Tender, finely limned narratives of domestic life - undressing his daughter at bedtime, French braiding her hair in preparation for a recital, counting to six million with his 6-year-old son - lead the narrator back in time to his own childhood, to his Jewish tribe, to everyday cruelties and love, to battles and lullabies.

'The personal and the social world, the past and what's going on now, all that gets stirred together in a pot, and what comes out is the writing,' Michelson said.

In 'Undressing Aunt Frieda,' in which the narrator and his young daughter visit an elderly relative in the hospital, he writes:

Undressing Aunt Frieda, I think of how,
undressing me, she would tilt back her head
as if listening for footsteps, the faint marching
of the S.S. men, whose one great dream was her death.

The poem 'Undressing My Daughter' takes place later the same night.

Gently I lift her jersey up, inside out,
over the boiled peach of her stomach,
a color I recognize as my wife's, after love.

The child's sleepy question will become a refrain.

'Would you love me,' she asks,
curling her lower lip past sensuality into an exaggerated pout,
'if I looked like this?'

The vivid intimacy of Michelson's images leads a reader from the narrator's family to his or her own. Who hasn't seen the inside of this place, described in the poem 'Like Nobody's Business?'

It's a war on poverty, I tell my son.
We're driving through the old neighborhood and I'm boring even myself,
pointing out the empty lots, like they're holes in my own heart.
Or this one, from the poem 'Gift-Wrapping the Garbage':
'Take out the damn garbage,' I tell my son.
Sure, I'd rather hug him, but right now
isn't my heart on the roller coaster
at Coney Island, and I'm barely holding on?

In 'Life Insurance,' the narrator shares a recollection of traveling to meet his wife's grandfather for the first time, a spine-punishing eight-hour drive he would then make every Thanksgiving for 30 years.

He's never met, my wife says, a real Jew before,
and I, resisting the urge to ask about imposters, watch him walk seven times
around this Wedding Chuppah of a wagon, kicking each tire, questioning
my engine's horsepower, and counting out, I could tell, real horses.

Memory slides forward in time, until, with a teenage child at the wheel, the tale continues:

Watch the road! I yell,
angry for no reason after all these years, except that I'm growing tired
and suddenly scared. It's almost sundown and I still don't understand
how the electricity travels from one lamppost to the next, lighting up the future
as if it's daybreak on the horizon and we have all the time in the world.

'I'm writing on that point where humor and tragedy meet, as it does for some of my favorite comedians,' Michelson says. 'I'm not writing to lay open the facts of my life, but I'm hoping to reach something in everyone's life.'

Paintings speak

Bookended by the two sections of more personal poems are verses that look through the eyes of others. In the section 'Head of a Man Beneath a Woman's Breast: The Life of Edvard Munch' Michelson's poems speak in the voices of several women close to the Norwegian artist whose family life was fraught with tragedy, as well as in the voice of the artist himself.

Michelson's twin passions for words and art commingle, too, in the section 'Bathing by Candlelight,' in which the subjects of paintings by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso, Schiele, Modigliani and Cassatt speak from the canvas.

'In that section of poems, I use the subjects to reflect on their own lives,' Michelson said, 'and the tension between them and the person who is defining how they'll be remembered in history.'

In the section titled 'The March of the Orphans,' he animates figures mentioned in prefaced snippets of true Holocaust accounts - like Polish Jewish writer and educator Janusz Korczak, who shares his thoughts early on the morning he will lead the 200 children at his orphanage 'proudly clad in Sabbath clothes' and singing, to the train that would take them to resettlement in the East - the Nazi euphemism for the death camp Treblinka.

The final section, 'The Jews That We Are,' includes this refrain in the poem 'Recital':

Would you still love me,
God asked my grandmother in the reception hall
before his grand recital,
if I wiped out your entire family, let's say all at once,
leaving only one self-involved American tributary to tell the tale?
It's the question life asks the narrator again and again in this collection.

Beyond the accessibility and freshness of Michelson's language, beyond his honesty and humor, beyond the vulnerability and humanity that renders a reader willing to go where he leads, a great gift of this book is his indomitable yes.