Sea Change (2008)

''Make of your compassion a crisper instrument,'' advises Jorie Graham in ''Undated Lullaby,'' ''you will need its blade.'' As in 2005's Overlord, Graham confronts modern wickedness — torture and global warming are two themes — in lush, sometimes hymnlike verse. Bleak meditations in which the day itself is ''a noose looking for a neck'' are tempered (in less dexterous hands they would simply be interrupted) by imagery like this: ''the girl...carrying the large bouquet of blue hydrangeas, shaking the water off.'' The title, Sea Change, recalls the book's one weakness: Whole poems flow together so much that they can become indistinct. A-