Stored in Robert Lax box.New York Times book review: To describe Robert Lax as a minimalist poet does scant justice to the reedlike shape of his "vertical" poems. A typical page in his most comprehensive book, "Poems (1962-1997)," might contain 20 words arranged in columnar form, a single syllable or punctuation mark to each line. One poem consists of "ro"‰/"‰ber"‰/"‰to" "” the name Lax was often called in his adopted country, Greece "” repeated three times, followed by "cries"‰/"‰the"‰/"‰roos"‰/"‰ter" with the final pair of syllables again thrice repeated.This can be curiously beguiling, over a brief period, but Lax's poetry has little of the visual playfulness or verbal ingenuity of like-minded members of that broad church known as concrete poetry, like Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish poet and artist with whom Lax corresponded. In "Pure Act," Michael N. McGregor tells us more than once that Lax was mainly interested in writing for himself.McGregor, a professor at Portland State University, has written a fond biography of an unworldly man who chose a life of celibacy "” he rejects suggestions that Lax "was secretly gay" "” and had little need for human company or even simple social pastimes like drinking for pleasure. Born in Olean, N.Y., in 1915, Lax moved to the Greek island of Kalymnos, close to the coast of Turkey, in 1964. He stayed for a decade before becoming the target of suspicion by islanders who resented what they saw as American involvement in the Turkish takeover of northern Cyprus in 1974. Lax had left the island temporarily at the time; only when he returned did he realize that people whom he liked and admired thought him a spy, and that he was being tracked by the police. "They all hate you," a sympathetic neighbor told him. Finally, he lost his house, whereupon he moved to the nearby "holy isle" of Patmos. It was there that McGregor met him in 1985.McGregor and Lax were united not just through religious faith, but in their belief that God was watching over them. This tone permeates "Pure Act," seldom to its advantage. When a mugger in Columbus, Ohio, lets Lax go without harm, both he and his biographer find it significant that a niece had "been praying for him when the incident happened." Already an ­admirer of Lax's mentor, the poet-monk Thomas Merton, McGregor encountered Lax almost by chance. "God must have something for you to tell me, or me to tell you," he remarked. The poet's response was to smile, "as if used to that kind of thing."Before committing himself to poetry, Lax had a remarkably varied career. Aspiring writers will be amazed to learn of the ease with which he stepped from The New Yorker, where he mainly answered letters to the editor, to Life (as a book reviewer), then to Time as a film critic, though he was ill equipped for any of these tasks. "Lax didn't want to spend so much time reading," McGregor says of his stint as a book reviewer. When it came to watching movies, his eyes hurt. From being a critic, he moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, but after working as a researcher on a film called "Siren of Atlantis," he "hung around jobless ."ˆ."ˆ. ­living off what he called "gifts.'"Š"Š"McGregor's book is a labor of love. As a biography of an original but limited poet, it would have benefited from greater detachment and deeper literary discussion, but the passages of personal memoir are vivid and engaging. The chapters on Lax's life in New York are amusing, while the pages on his expulsion from Kalymnos by islanders he had hitherto romanticized are dramatic and dismaying. He saw out his final years in a small house on Patmos, writing, praying, pressing himself against a wall whenever a motorbike passed and feeding a swarm of infected cats with scraps of fish obtained from fishermen at the port. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.