Publishers's Weekly Published: March 13, 2006 Hoops Major Jackson. Norton, $23.95 (128p) ISBN 0-393-05937-5 In his second collection, National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist Jackson (Leaving Saturn, 2002) pays tribute to timeless and timely monuments of American culture and history. Set mostly in an urban landscape, the poems range over a variety of addresses: one envisions neighborhood basketball as a metaphor for life ("The body on defense, / Playing up close, ghoulish, / Lacking grace, afraid / He'd go face-to-face"); others recall the trials and travails of adolescence or pay homage to writers like Shirley Jackson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. In one poem, a grandfather struggles to maintain his integrity in a changing world: "he has watched the neighborhood,- / postwar marble steps, a scrubbed frontier / of Pontiacs lining the curb, fade to a hood"; in another, a fourth-grade teacher unable to remember her students' names like "Tarik, Shaniqua, [and] Amari . . . nicknamed the entire class / after French painters." The long poem "Letter to Brooks," attempts to explain the contemporary scene to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who died in 2000. This book works to forge a large and spacious America, one capable of housing imagination.