An alba is a song sung to a lover as dawn encroaches. “Alba” is also the Gaelic word for Scotland, a variety of shrub rose, the white matter of the brain, and the surname of a gorgeous movie star. A Populus alba is an American poplar, Pityriasis alba is a common skin disorder, and the linea alba a fibrous band in the abdomen connecting the oblique and transverse abdominal muscles. The list could continue. The albas sprinkled throughout Richard Kenney’s new collection, “The One-Strand River” (Knopf, 192 pages, $26.95), are of the first kind; they are love poems. But no doubt Mr. Kenney is attuned to the word’s full resonance: He is a wordsmith. He hammers words into new forms, finding strange specimens, cracks them open to discover hidden meanings, and welds them together to create improbable structures. The look of a word on the page, archaisms, scientific terminology, nonsense, wordplay, and, above all, sound, are the smithy’s tools. But Mr. Kenney isn’t only interested in exploring language’s effects. He’s forging an original, muscular idiom, up to the task, even, of describing the memory of a lover:

not that still-warm, breeze-
riffled roadkill
I’d call Life, imprecisely,
love-sot in the old-toad
kissed anthroparochial
coign of vantage,
but rather that sledge
touched, light-curdled sacerdotal
bell of the brass world whanged
again on one of its jillion
resonating, wincing
frequencies—
a chord,
a frisson,
songlike, kin to the chill
priest-whistle
rhyming with itself in the high,
stone-winged
belfry of the pelvis…

Mr. Kenney’s lines are dynamic and taut, fast and freewheeling. They strain against and sometimes breach their disciplined forms. These poetics recall a range of poets — from Gerard Manley Hopkins to James Merrill — but they are not derivative. Mr. Kenney’s verse can be brilliant and it can be maddening. But it is almost always something new.

This is his fourth collection, and first in 14 years. The wait could not have been the result of writer’s block; at 192 pages, the book (beautifully produced) is, for a stand-alone collection, practically Tolstoyan in length.

And Tolstoyan in scope. It’s all here: war, peace, love, politics, sex, fatherhood, Greek mythology, the incursions of man on the natural world (and vice versa), occultism, biology, quantum physics, even Mother Goose. The range in tone and form is also immense, more so, even, than in his previous diverse collections. Mr. Kenney’s lines here are sometimes long (“Cassocked, monkish muttering, gum-suckled, so-and-so-called cuckold”), and sometimes short (“O”). He is in turn elegiac and irreverently funny. He opens with a spare, lovely double haiku that lands on the marvelous word “monofilament” — but also makes room for a rollicking poem called “New Year, with Nipperkin,” which manages to rhyme “Seder, ah,” with “etc.”

What stays the same throughout is the quest to uncover reservoirs of meaning and wonder hidden beneath conventional perception. “Why can’t we blink the old white cinder, / Then, surrender / To the new? To see a moon not ‘new,’ but new?” Seeing things new — and simultaneously being alert to the interplay of language — is what Mr. Kenney’s poetry is after. Calling a phase of the moon “new” obscures what it means to look in the sky and see nothing there; it puts a moon where there is none. At the same time, though, joining “new” to both the moon and the absence of its image adds whole new meaning to the word and to its reference. Language is various.

Mr. Kenney gets from it whatever he can. His frequent use of scientific nomenclature, and the referential swerves, often with only alliteration or rhyme to yoke disparate terms, can make reading these poems dizzying — at times even baffling. His punning can be painful, and he is, one senses, only too happy to deploy an unfamiliar term. A few endnotes help a little, and a dictionary — preferably the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary — helps a lot. But by and large the work is worth it. Mr. Kenney’s poems usually manage to be difficult without being too pretentious, and his linguistic showmanship — “A wooze of hydrogen annealed its star” — is in the service of something greater.

Take, for example, “Contraction,” the poem from which the above line comes. It is a powerful depiction of a father watching his wife go into premature labor. In three quatrains with alternating end rhymes, framed by two single-line stanzas (“One thousand one … one thousand two — I wonder” and “One thousand three … one thousand four … far thunder”), Mr. Kenney manages to capture the “queer displacement” of a father coaching a mother through birthing contractions. He is both very close to the action and impossibly outside of it. The anticipation of his daughter’s birth butts against his fear. Time dilates: The lines are expansive and the vowels long. But the slant rhymes (effect/ fact, laws/because, weeks/wakes, shies/she’s) betray the speaker’s nervous impatience. In this tension, wonder is born. “Breathe,” he says as he emerges out of the long tunnel between seconds. “What daughter wakes / Into tomorrow’s dream?”

“The One-Strand River” is divided into 11 parts loosely organized by theme. Two sections tackling politics and current events are the weakest. Mr. Kenney’s strong political conscience shows itself subtly throughout, but when he addresses “Dick and Sunny’s / Darkening smiles” directly, he falters. Satire can be wickedly effective and Mr. Kenney can be quite funny, but here the sardonic humor seems to belittle rather than strike. In “What Went Wrong in Iraq?” for example, his reference to a conservative pundit, who cooed over the physique of former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, as “the war- / weary ex- / Rumsfeld slut” undermines the strange eloquence that ends the poem: “the heart of the human / is a licked / reed.” The image of a clownish Paul Wolfowitz, “dressed casually in alligator clips and a hood,” is no match for Mr. Kenney’s depiction of, say, a line of goslings passing a concrete mixer.

“Often I wish to sing, / When all I can manage is a laugh,” he confesses at one point. In the face of political folly his powers fail him. He is better when he sticks to the music blown through the licked reed — and then he is marvelous.

Ms. Thomas has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Slate, among other publications.