If you’re lucky, the most fundamental lesson of life — the fact that we live on borrowed time, with the final foreclosure never more than a breath away — arrives in installments. Our loved ones disappear at a dignified pace, in single file. Each shock prepares us for the next.

In this sense, the poet Alan Shapiro has been profoundly unlucky. During the late 1990s, he lost both his sister and brother to cancer. Meanwhile, he was beset by the scarcely more bearable trials of middle age: ailing parents, a crumbling marriage. The poet’s response, initially, was a book of essays about his sister’s death, “Vigil” (1997). Yet he soon returned to verse with “Song and Dance” (2002), and in an interview that same year, he explained why: “I needed poetry then. I didn’t need prose. I needed song. I needed art at its most elevated — as elevated as I could make it, anyway.” The poems in that collection, which represented a quantum leap forward for Mr. Shapiro, both memorialized his brother and acknowledged just how meager the consolations of art could be. Poetry didn’t kill the pain, and it didn’t fill the void left by his brother’s death. It simply allowed the poet to (in John Berryman’s phrase) bear and be. No wonder he needed it so badly.

To judge from his new collection, “Old War” (Houghton Mifflin, 96 pages, $22), he needs it still. To be sure, Mr. Shapiro is in the midst of happier days. He remarried in 2003, and several of the poems here sound a note of ease and erotic contentment. There is “Harvest,” a witty gloss on Sappho which confers upon sex a clock-stopping timelessness. And in “Bower,” the couple in their bedroom share a vaguely pantheistic consummation with the surrounding forest: “Shadows of leaves / commingling / with the single / shadow of our bodies.” Indeed, coming from a lesser poet, the latter piece might have registered as one more patchouli-scented roll in the hay. What saves it is Mr. Shapiro’s truncated line, and his metaphysical bent, which transforms a fluttering curtain into

a breeze-shaped
vagrant boundary
set to make
what’s coming in
to us come more keenly,
not to keep it out.

Still, for all these tokens of rejuvenation, he remains a death-haunted poet. Sometimes his approach to the subject is ingeniously metaphoric. In “Cold,” the rolls of coins stacked in a bank vault strike him as so many corpses, with the last traces of human heat ebbing out of them. Note, he tells us,

how the cold moves out from particle
to particle, to atom, through the coin
and roll and stack until there’s nothing else
beyond a frozen currency of such profound
forgetting that your hand, your finger, your
capacity to feel at all, would turn
aphasic at the touch of it, burning with cold.

In a companion piece, “Heat,” hotness itself is passed from hand to hand, as the poet inspects the “minute continuous changes” of temperature with a sort of thermodynamic relish. Not surprisingly, the language takes an ardent turn, right around the time that Mr. Shapiro shuffles together “everything / heating, heated, or in heat…” At once we are treated to another glimpse into the boudoir. But conflagrations are self-devouring, and the ashen imagery in the final lines reminds us that flames die as certainly as we do. Elsewhere the poet is even less oblique. “After” looks back to his sister’s illness. “How” cocks an ear to the endlessly ringing telephone “in the bedroom of the afterlife.” And “Black” — Mr. Shapiro generally favors stubby, one-word titles — is a perfect example of how he matches his style to the matter at hand.

Some poets evince a lightning-like reluctance to strike the same word twice — in a poem such as “A Summer Night,” you can practically sense Auden’s delight at each factory-fresh syllable. Others revel in the expressive potential of repeating a word once, twice, three times. Randall Jarrell comes to mind: If you subtracted “well,” “water,” and “pump” from his wonderful “Well Water,” there would be almost nothing left.

Mr. Shapiro is a master of that same technique. In “Black,” he starts with the skimpiest of anecdotes: Once, when he was a small boy, he and his mother observed a passing funeral procession of black cars. It is the black “flickering between the white slats / of the porch railing” that sets the poem in motion. Yet its air of inexorability comes from the dogged repetition of a few key words. The poet recalls how the polished limousines reflected everything and how, in the darkened windows, he saw nobody

looking back at me
but me, my mother, she looking on,
me pointing at me pointing
from the black door and the blacker
window and now from the black back
of the final car that carries us up
the steep hill smaller and still smaller
till we’re finally over it and gone.

The halting syntax and abstemious vocabulary slow us down — they mimic the speed of the procession itself. Yet those limousines will reach their final destination. And so, as Mr. Shapiro recognizes in these consistently eloquent poems, will we all.

Mr. Marcus is a critic, translator, and the author of “Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut.”