Accessibility cuts two ways in poetry. On the one hand, people can "get it" easily enough to like it. On the other, what's easily understood often can't sustain interest for long or is easily forgotten. And that, obviously, is not what poets want.

George Bilgere manages to be both accessible and durable in his collection Haywire, which was published in 2006 as the winner of Utah State University Press's May Swenson Award. Bilgere gives a rare reading this week at John Carroll, but the real reason to look at this book two years after its release is that it has achieved something nearly impossible in the poetry world: sales. It's a little like earning a hot lottery ticket. Former US poet laureate Billy Collins recommended the book to Garrison Keillor, who read from it on his nationally syndicated Writer's Almanac show. As a result, Haywire sold out its first printing in about three weeks. Within a year, the book was in its third printing, as was an earlier book of Bilgere's, The Good Kiss.

Fans of Keillor's will understand immediately why the storyteller likes Bilgere's work, and they're just about certain to like it, too. It is accessible and genuine, and it reaches deeply - shamelessly, in some cases - into the depth of experience of a middle-aged man. There's the memory of his Parliament-smoking, cancer-doomed mother in "the Surgeon General," marked in time by Cassius Clay knocking out Sonny Liston. It's pegged to the poet's adolescence by the bathroom memory of "a wrinkled girl/with a staple in her navel/[who] presided over [his] pale,/original boners."

That rubbing of sweaty sexuality against formal language with a backdrop of passing time is a hallmark of the collection. It happens again in "Miss December," wherein the poet finds a pinup girl in an old box in the garage, "where she's waited all these years." He doesn't say how many years, but notes, "she must be in her sixties now ... her knees are giving her trouble." In the end the speaker takes her inside - "One more time, for auld lang syne."

Another of the book's hallmarks is merciless confrontation with mortality. In "The Bear," the reader takes in the image of an old woman cuddling the teddy bear she was given as a child, though now she's at the nursing home, her life dismissed in a summary-style laundry list of houses, jobs, births barely remembered and apologies until she ends up there alone "in a wheelchair out on the lawn/with nothing to do all day but love/your little brown bear, who waited/all this time for you to come home."

It's a brutally honest look at lonely death, as though that trumps any of the hope and possibility we hold so dear before we reach that time. Most of the poems in Haywire are loaded with the awareness of death, tinged with nostalgia over lost childhood and adolescence, and colored by American culture of the mid- and late-20th century. That's not all sad. Sometimes it's funny, as in "This Summer," which begins, "The big-dick rides have taken over/the Coke-soaked acres/of Great America," and then finds phalluses all over the midway of a contemporary fair, and vaginas in the rides of yesteryear, like the tunnel of love, which he seems to lament are obsolete because "they were too slow./They took forever."

There's a measure of Poetry Professor humor, which predictably creeps into the work of tenured university faculty poets; poems like "Simile Practice," which feeds off the clumsily original expressions of people for whom English is not a first language, and "Once Again I Fail to Read an Important Novel," which celebrates the enjoyment of doing nothing in the face of the expectation that a learned person consume all the Great Works of the ages.

The resigned melancholy, linguistic play and romanticism in these poems remind me of another great Northeast Ohio poet from another small college, the late Hale Chatfield, who taught at Hiram. Both have a deep love for the moment and a musical appreciation of life's discord. The final poem in Bilgere's Haywire, "Global Warming," packages the dynamic neatly: The poet watches bad news on TV in a bar - starving kids in Africa, failing heat tiles on the Space Shuttle - but meanwhile, life in Cleveland isn't so bad. He's got a dinner engagement and the food will be delightful, so even if he's "in a dying city at the end of the world ... we're all reasonably happy."

Haywire, By George Bilgere. Utah State University Press, 2006, 80 pp., hardcover, $12.95. Reading: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 13, Rodman Hall, Room A, John Carroll University, 216.397.1886.