In her first book of poems, “Halflife” (Norton, 86 pages, $23.95), Meghan O’Rourke exhibits the same quality of refinement and intelligence that has distinguished her tenure as poetry editor at the Paris Review. As in much of the work published there during the past two years, the poems here are sincere and dependable. There is just enough ventured for something to be gained, and the whole collection is brought off with real skill and fluency.

Ms. O’Rourke’s kind of talent often risks a certain innocuousness. To keep her poems from becoming too facile or precious, she introduces a current of psychic trauma, frequently of the domestic variety. “Two Sisters” recounts the death in utero of a twin sister and the haunted childhood that ensues—”What kind of sister keeps to herself/ in the shadows of the grass?” Similar themes reappear in the more obscure and atmospheric “Epitaph for Mother and Child” and “Stillborn” — clearly, there was trouble at home.

Her propensity for the personal might lead some to class Ms. O’Rourke with the so-called Quietist group of American poets, such as C.K. Williams and Carl Phillips, who hew to such subjects as the hand upon the writing table, in the increasing light of three o’- clock, on a Thursday, etc. Ms. O’Rourke does flirt with Quietist conventions, but much of her work deals straightforwardly with passion. The sex in these poems tends to be vast and thematic, as in “Thermopylae” and “Troy” — in the latter poem the speaker’s body becomes the walled city and her lover’s the Argive host, or else she’s the shore and he’s the ships; this may be a bit over the top, but at least it’s not dry.

Homer shows up again in the same capacity in “My Life as a Teenager”: This time it’s a bunch of unsuspecting young women who are in for the classical treatment. The poem holds out the promise of being an imaginative vignette on American adolescence but turns out to be a doleful cri de coeur. Nor is this the only time in the collection that an engaging fiction gives way to portentousness. The spare and strange “Pilgrim’s Progress” is populated by the “wild cats of San Juan” and “the warm cool / light as it bends / around the unharmed earth,” but the first person singular intrudes upon the scene and the spell is broken. The world of the poem becomes a proscenium for the speaker’s mental situation.

Still, there are moments of genuine literary daring. The second poem in the collection, “Sleep,” is a redaction of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” Where Bishop writes, “From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning / please come flying,” Ms. O’Rourke has it, “Pawnbroker, scavenger, cheapskate, / come crawling from your pigeon filled backrooms.” “Palimpsest” features the line “The summer passes like horses,” a fair pass at John Ashbery, though this poem too ends in a personalizing gesture. And “West Port Cemetery” is an exercise in pattern book Imagism — it can be reprinted here in its entirety —

All the rust tongues
In boxes in the mown earth;
Red trumpet flowers.

Not that all the allusions here are so high flown. “Sophomores” is a poem addressed by a “princess” to “a boy whose heart was a size too small.” An organ of almost identical description formerly belonged to the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

This reference is an unlikely accident if only because Ms. O’Rourke takes such evident pains with every line of verse she writes. She is an excellent poet in the broad, professional sense, as a sort of abstract proposition. The habit of writing good poetry generally rather than good poems particularly can probably be attributed to some of her contemporary influences, among them Robert Pinsky, John Hollander, and J.D. McClatchy, and others of the more exquisite type. But these poems have no pretension to novelty, only to style. That style consists in their amalgam of influences, qualified by a deep earnestness. You have to have taste to write poetry like this, and Meghan O’Rourke has taste to spare.

Mr. Volner is a poet and critic living in Manhattan.