In both literal and figurative senses Frank Lima is a poet who really cooks. A master chef whose adolescent education took place in the school of hard knocks among hustlers, whores and junkies of Spanish Harlem, he's also a semi-legendary poet, quietly revered by cognoscenti of the art.

"Inventory" brings back into print the early poems that caused Lima to be dubbed a naif genius by New York literary critics of the Sixties, while updating us as to the fine poems he's continued, somewhat intermittently, to produce since then.

Lima's stylistic signature emerges early in this book and persists: a sensual, slangy musicality, informed by a sense of humor streewise beyond its years and composite of equal parts courage and desperation.

Raw, gritty, nervy and switchblade-quick, Lima's poems of the late 1950s and 1960s -- written when he was in his early twenties -- dance confidently and with remarkable poise out on the anxious high-wire of their own edgy, bravura energy: "I'd swish through the door / tiptoeing / goofed on speedballs / with a yellow-jaundice twinkle / in my glassy eyes…" [p. 54]

Discovering startling flowers of delicate sensation in shooting galleries and jails ("catnaps / glassine dreams / of golden cookers / dollar bill collars / hypos -- / like glass hummingbirds" [p. 56]), these poems allow artificial paradises to blossom on the meanest streets and in the unlikeliest lower depths of a hellish urban underworld.

"Abuela's Wake," a poem that unfolds uneasily in the presence of the youth's dead grandmother, evokes a scary inner-city childhood world with convincing intensity. Here, amid the extremity of family grief, something like a lost innocence is restored, as wonder and dread peep through a self-protective smart-punk attitude. "Mom screamed barbed wire / in my shoe-high ears / my stickball smile fell off my face… / the wake's witch / wearing her mothball smile / held the black rosary / like a snake with a Catholic head it still hisses in my bed dribbling the wooden words / Dios te salve Maria Dios te salve Maria outside the mouth of December tinked on the windows." (p. 52]

More searing still is 'Mom I'm All Screwed Up," an unforgettable and deeply unsettling narrative of incest. Here we are truly with the poet inside the belly of the beast, looking out, "Moth-eyed / by the neon signs," [p. 49] like a dreamer in a nighmare unable to scream.

Perhaps it goes without saying that for all the early poems' temerity in the face of trauma, the life events Lima inventories don't add up to many happy endings. Yet through their, murky, endarkened, semi-surreal subcurrents, strange lights of tender feeling gleam up unexpectedly, like lost treasure glinting from the rot and wreckage in which R is imbedded.

Poetry has never been Frank Lima's vocation in the strict sense, though there's some poetic justice in the vocational choice he did make by obtaining a degree in culinary arts and establishing himself as a professional chef. Linking the two kinds of craft is the palpable sensuousness of his writing.

Eros has inspired this poet's taste buds from the first. 'Pudgy," one early romantic invocation, addresses its teenage Muse as "my chocolate Princess" [p. 551; another, 'Mulata," catches the poet "Chewing Juicy Fruit' as he proceeds to wander "The chestnut thighbone avenue" over "your softsilk body… A cherrynostrum wonder." [pp. 46ᇃ]

And Uma's palate only refines with time. Consider the delicious little 1994 lyric, "Te Amo": "when I think of you / each day / is my daily bread / and a little sea / of peas in my soup." [p. 140]

Not that for this poet-chef the wisdom of food isn't also occasionally cosmic. Lobsters in a cooking pot, in one prose-poem meditation, appear as "hot / balloons that frighten the kiss of death." [p. 851 Elsewhere -- in an extravagant, playful 'Ode to Julia Child" -- "A cream soup is a recurring moment From another life." lp. 168]

'Inventory" rates stars across the board in this poetry critic's Guide Bleu.

Tom Clark is a prolific author and poet who regularly contributes reviews to the San Francisco Chronicle. His latest book of poetry is 'Empire of Skin" (Black Sparrow Press).