Three recent books indicate that the art of the short poem may benefit from a long writing life.

W.S. Merwin remembered a Latin poem from his school days recently, but this time felt he could put it into English. It was supposedly written by Roman Emperor Hadrian. Merwin calls it “Little Soul”: “Little soul little stray / little drifter / now where will you stay / all pale and all alone / after the way / you used to make fun of things.” This is from Merwin’s Pulitzer-prize winning book The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon, 117 pages, $22). Another, “Parts of a Tune,” opens: “One old man keeps humming the same few notes / of some song he thought he had forgotten . . .” and that catches the easy austerity of these poems though not their variety, richness, and humane rightness.

Nina Cassian was born in Romania in 1924 and was exiled in 1985. Continuum (Norton, 104 pages, $23.95) — ranging across six decades (“with no vacations and no retirement”) — contains many poems in which the pleasure is that of speaking out with a surrealist flourish, as in “Malignant Feast”: “The trivial noises of the petty tyrants / to whom power means / to slurp and burp at official dinners, / and whose favorite dish is made up of / violinists, / including their violins.” At other times, especially in the poems on poetry and on death, something else sounds free and clear. “Metamorphosis” concludes: “Today, / I am neutered, / or become a domestic fowl. / I submit to conventions, / I eat regularly — / and I sleep — / my beak in my feathers.”

In his 19th book, Sestets: Poems (FSG, 75 pages, $23), Charles Wright includes only “sestets” — usually two sets of three long lines variously positioned on the page. There’s great art in the sometimes miraculous transitions and juxtapositions, yet Wright mixes vernacular and apocalypse with a bluesman’s easy effort. “Cannibal Time” gets most of the best lines but in many poems there are moments in which something else stirs. “Hovercraft” is unforgettable: “Hummingbird stopped as a period, breast embossed / purple-pink-crimson / Outside the northside window, / Wings invisible in their stillness, / unquiet, never faltering. // And then, whoosh, he’s gone, / Leaving a little hole in the air, one that the air / doesn’t rush in to fill. / Empty pocket. / The world, and the other world, are full of them.”

tom.develyn@comcast.net