Now in paperback, his Salvage Operations, New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 185 pp., $9.95) aspires to epic. In poems like "The Coming Changes,Fog Warning,To An Aging Athlete," and especially "The Eastern Point Meditations," Mariani etches sharp-edged portraits about art, war, the struggle for personal education, the hard life of working stiffs, and strong religious faith into a unified song of praise and blame for his tribe, the world. Like Whitman, like William Carlos Williams, he has a talent for ransacking history and rich, private memory at the same time.