Poet Richard Levine will visit the Adirondack Center for Writing in Saranac Lake Nov. 15. The Vietnam veteran and retired New York City teacher will be part of ACW’s successful BarkReaders program that takes place every other month at the ACW. Each BarkReaders includes an open mic and features an author presenting a recent book publication. In addition to his reading, Levine will sign copies of his latest collection. (Disclosure: Jerry McGovern serves on the board of directors of the Adirondack Center for Writing.)

Levine’s 2019 “Selected Poems” draws from five previous collections, from 2004 to 2018. It’s a rich and diverse collection from a sensitive observer who provides original images connecting the reader to what he sees on the surface and below. In those 14 years, his poetic sense addressed many subjects, among them antisemitism, racism, war and family.

In “Out of Light’s Reach,” Levine, who was born in 1947, tells of the Holocaust being part of the background of his childhood, its horror “always on the edge of my life, /like fringe on a prayer shawl … a nightmare waiting / just out of light’s reach.”

In “Before the Last,” he catalogs more horror — at “Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, / Uganda to the Congo … Birmingham to Little Rock” and “the children of Wounded Knee / live by the banks of neon and one-armed bandits.” It’s a beautiful, graphic chronicle of cruelty balanced only a bit by his memory of dancing near the seashore, where there was “one last peaceful wave.”

A Vietnam veteran, Levine remembers “Your wound and a field bandage were sorely mismatched. Still … I tried to plug the red tide.” In “Mud-Walking,” he tells us he “prayed when mud-walking / sounded like chest wounds sucking.” And still, old and at home, “for 30 years, the floodplain of that ghost river has called me.” His portraits of soldiers in combat, at home fighting memories, calling sweethearts from an innocent time, are brutal and beautiful.

“Before the Distance of Men,” addresses the poet’s superficial relationship with his father, where “Surfaces defined us: cars washed and waxed, walls spackled …” His father teaches him “a man’s way — head above, heart below the surface,” a lesson the poet has clearly rejected.

In “Late Hour,” another paternal poem, the perspective has changed, and Levine is the father struggling to parent. Late at night, he is reading in the kitchen, waiting and worrying, because “Behind a door, I found a daughter still not at home.” His words echo for every parent who identifies with him “sprawled between anger and concern.”

Levine’s final poem returns to family, an old poet-father remarking on the soil he has tended, “I gather in the past / and spread it over my retired garden.” His children are part of that garden who return “to share and dare the moment / to believe in all we gather and do.”

The totality of Levine’s work — there are more than 100 poems in this book — is a balance of the harsh world he writes about that has a softness he sometimes finds and cherishes.

Levine will read from his new volume, “Now in Contest,” at the Adirondack Center for Writing. It will be good to hear this poet’s voice.