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 Open Fred Chappell's new book of poems and you'll find a surprise on nearly every page. Chappell has created a new poetic form, the poem within a poem.

Think of Russian eggs: A smaller poem is nested inside a larger, framing poem. Each informs the other, giving the whole an added weight, dimension and completeness. As a reader's aid, the two points of view are set in different typefaces.

Chappell's poetry has always been known for its clarity and accessibility. That directness is here in this collection. The form, like anything new, takes getting used to. It can become confusing.

An exceptionally strong poem showcasing the form is "The Caretakers." It centers on an image within an image:

We tend the grave of the broken son of man.

We keep the silent house without a hearth

Wherein the man with vacant stare and gaptooth grin

Calmly searches his gleamless night of earth,

Aloof, in sober patient state alone,

Bemused, aware or unaware of stone

That spells his name and final date. Again,

Fresh flowers stand boldly in the light cold rain

Amid the winds that scour down from the north.

We are the grass, the rain. We are the sun.

The notion of a shadow box can take many forms, and "The Caretakers" is just one possibility. Chappell comes up with others, too. Among the most surprising is the idea of reliquaries, a place for storing or displaying objects of veneration. Here he takes lines from German Romantic poets in translation and nests them "in new reliquary settings." In another section, he uses the notion of musical counterpoint, where "dissensions" create a two-part harmony.

In his introduction to Part Five, Chappell notes, "Any Western language we choose to speak and read enfolds the prayers of past ages." He takes stanzas of Christian Latin hymns and writes stanzas in English elaborating on them. He closes each poem with a translation of the Latin.

The poems in "Shadow Box" speak of the stuff that poems usually address -- anything and everything. Chappell spent nearly a decade working on the collection.

The new form isn't a game to challenge himself or the reader, he said. It sprang in part from observation, watching and listening to people talk around the same subject. "I began to ask myself if lyric poetry could do the same thing."

Here's evidence it can. And it's an amazing feat.