Chalk it up to childhood nights dozing to the sound of parents' old Underwood typewriter keys thundering toward the bell that tolled the end of each line. Blame it on Pavlov and his dogs. Whatever: I'm one of those readers who slobber for the "end" chime.

Not at every line, of course. No. In fact, the brassy clank of predictable end-rhyme hurts my venerable dog-year-ears. But I do need to hear some sign of wholeness somewhere in a poem, or at least some satisfactory stops along the way, and that's why new poetry collections like Stephanie Stickland's Losing L'una / WaveSon.nets (Penguin, 128 pages, $18) make me crazy. According to Majorie Welish in a front-note, "Strickland's lyric poetry reads the entire gamut of knowledge."

Sorry, but that won't do. Art is about the artist's giving individual, creative shape to his / her / our knowledge. Of course we aren't really privy to every single thing in Strickland's mind, much less the world's mind; nevertheless the book feels that messy, that inchoate.

WaveSon.nets are snippets that resemble cryptic e-mail messages. No bells ring; none "ends"; you can hardly tell where the book itself ends, its two halves joined (upside-down) at the paper spine.

And yet another new collection works well despite being printed similarly (the "flip book," often used these days for children's books). Each upside-down half-book has a different author (separated by style, joined by matrimony). Jenn and Chris McCreary's Enfacements / a Doctrine of Signatures (Singing Horse, 110 pages, $12.50) invokes the blithe spirit of young poets' emotional housekeeping. She says, "one feared biblical foods; the other / set the table with plates of figs, / olives & the like. both existed for / three days on nothing / but milk & aphorisms." He says, "So he turns / dry eyes on everyday customs, he never does things the / expected way, he sees that things change too much if you / think, entire lives passing by if you blink." (Yes, McCreary is so avant that he risks the occasional end-rhyme.)

Poet Pattie McCarthy, like the McCrearys, works by association: that is, what comes next is governed not by a fixed form but by a word, a sound, a thought that causes another word, sound, etc., to chime in the writer's mind. Judging from her latest, book of (h)rs (Apogee Press, 64 pages, $12.99) McCarthy's mind -- as Strickland's is said to -- encompasses the "full gamut of knowledge." In this book, however, McCarthy uses her knowledge selectively; for example, Part I, "bell (h)rs," borrows from medieval saints' legends and is measured into the three-hour periods -- matins, lauds, prime, etc. -- chimed by monastery bells. She gives me that Underwood chime almost literally.

Diane Ackerman's agile Origami Bridges (HarperCollins, 147 pages, $22.95) is neatly represented by "Cross-Country," a poem about both skiing and memory. Rhythmically athletic, dizzying, each free-verse swoop alights on a subtle rhyme before the next one takes off. The end-bell rings almost the way it did when a rhyme rang down the imaginary curtain in Shakespeare's early plays: "I sometimes glide around you, / or with you side-by-side, breathless, / but taking either in stride."

A Native American from the Muskegee Nation, Joy Harjo writes story poems, incantatory chants. The start-flow-stop of the poems in How We Became Human: New & Selected Poems: 1975-2001 (W.W. Norton, 192 pages, $26.95) seems governed by breath-units or single-thought-cluster units.

The end of one of the best poems to come out of 9 / 11, "When the World as We Knew It Ended," marks an end to that day's stopped-stillness: "But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies / who needed milk and comforting, and someone / picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble / and began to sing about the light flutter / the kick beneath the skin of the earth / we felt there, beneath us."

If the notion of becoming human seems an end in itself, a number of this year's new poetry books seek it. Humanness is a main theme in Nikki Giovanni's slick new dual-media publication, Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems (William Morrow / HarperCollins, 128 pages, $16.95), which comes with a CD of her reading from it, tough and furious as ever. Here are lines from "We're Going to Mars": "Mars is 1 year of living on Mars ... plus 1 year to return to Earth ... 3 years of Earthlings being in a tight space going to an unknown place with an unsure welcome awaiting them ... harsh conditions ... and no known landmarks to keep them human."

Sharon Olds is interested in what it means to be human and how to achieve that state. Almost all the free-verse poems in The Unswept Room (Knopf, 96 pages, $25) end with some speculation about what it takes. Fascinated as ever by details of her tortured relationship with her own mother, these poems, though they're still in the latter-day confessional mode, go further to explore, restoratively, Olds' connection with her own daughter. "First Weeks," a wonder-filled yet almost clinically precise poem about her newborn, ends, "I fell in love. I became human."

Daughter-love and the chime of the human: Elizabeth Spires' latest, Now the Green Blade Rises (W. W. Norton, 80 pages $21.95) resonates. Spires' poetry exemplifies the comfort of the end-bell. Its many complex layers and textures create a coherent whole, like shirts in a drawer or, yes, the mess of blades that green your lawn.

Spires' narrator is both daughter and mother in these moving poems. She tells her dead mother that "it is only a matter of time / before I lie down beside you / and we become all things to each other -- / mother, child, thief, betrayer, love, friend -- / we will be all things as we whisper, How green life was!" With a haunting cover illustration by Tezh Modarressi (novelist Anne Tyler's daughter), this book is something your own mother and / or daughter could love for seasons to come.

Clarinda Harriss is chair of the Towson University English Department. She has published three collections of poetry and contributed to two scholarly works on poetry. Her work appears in many magazines. She edits and directs BrickHouse Books Inc., Maryland's oldest continuously publishing small press.