Julie Suk is a widow and great-grandmother, a member of Myers Park Country Club and an avid bridge player. Her manners are Southern, her silver is monogrammed, her lipstick is neatly applied.

Suk is also a poet. And maybe now you're making certain assumptions. Maybe you're thinking that verse written by an elderly Southerner with a sustaining membership in the Junior League will be flowery and forgettable.

Perhaps it's not unreasonable, that assumption. But it's wrong.

Suk (rhymes with "duke") is nationally recognized and viewed by fellow poets as one of North Carolina's leading voices.

Now, at age 87, Suk has a new book, "Lie Down with Me" (Autumn House Press; $19.95). With selections from four earlier volumes as well as new poems, it represents her best work - poems that are spare and sensual, often dark, yet not without hope.

The retired editor of Poetry magazine, the nation's flagship poetry journal, likes this new book so much he keeps a copy on his nightstand. Suk's editor at Autumn House Press, who calls her "arguably the best poet in America," has nominated it for several prizes, including the Pulitzer.

Many poets know Suk's work. Most people outside the poetry world, including most people in Charlotte, do not. Limited recognition and even less money - a pittance in book royalties, maybe $50 for a poem published in a review - tend to be the lot of most poets.

Still, Michael Simms, Suk's editor, hopes she'll find new fans with this collection, which is full of lines that evoke a shiver of recognition as they capture the human condition:

In the warm intersection of sex and love,

the mouth puckers as soon as we're born,

starved no matter how often and deep

we push into someone else.

"It breaks my heart," Simms says, "that her neighbors don't know how wonderful she is."

The dark taking aim

Julie Suk is in the mood to read some people poems. This is what she tells an audience of about 15 gathered for a Sunday afternoon reading at Park Road Books.

Suk wears a lacy cream blouse and ivory clip-on earrings. Her highlighted hair remains more blond than gray. She looks at least a decade younger than her 87 years, and when she speaks, you hear the rhythmic lilt of Mobile, Ala., where she was born and raised by a homemaker mother and lawyer father.

The first poem she reads - her idea of a people poem - is titled "Smoldering." It begins with an image of a dead body, her grandfather "propped in his coffin."

Then she reads "Underworld," which was inspired by the true story of a man who discovered a giant boa constrictor under his house:

He thought the racket that morning

Was from cats, until he looked out

In time to see a coon swallowed headfirst,

Feet kicking to the last.

"I do write a lot about violence - blood and guts," she says offhandedly one day. "I don't know why."

Is there a contradiction between Suk's sunny demeanor and the darkness in her work?

Patricia Hooper, a member of Suk's poetry critique group, doesn't think so.

"You're always aware when you're reading one of Julie's poems that she has seen both sides of experience," grief, as well as joy.

A recurring Suk theme is that tragedy lurks just around the corner. When the late Charles Kuralt interviewed her in 1997 on "Poetry Live," a show on WUNC-TV, she told him she is always afraid to be too happy, "because I know tomorrow something bad might happen to undermine it."

In her poem "Rounds," which she reads at Park Road Books, she inserts this sentiment like a minor chord amid a breezy melody:

The moon floats off,

the dog whimpers under the steps.

How lovely the evening

with a child on my lap,

a circle of us singing

heedless of the dark taking aim.

The poem includes a scene Suk once witnessed: a woman clinging to a viaduct's ledge,/ police, priest, and the curious crowded below. ....

"We're all hanging," she tells her audience when she finishes, "on one viaduct ledge or another."

'The real thing'

For 20 years, Joseph Parisi's job as editor of Poetry magazine included wading through thousands of poems that arrived in the mail each week. On weekends, he carried them home in paper shopping bags.

In one of those bags, he discovered Julie Suk. "I just felt right from the start that this is the real thing," said Parisi, now retired, speaking from his Chicago home. Her poems, he says, are "very original and fresh and direct. They really have a kind of eternal presence about them. I can't see them getting dated."

Suk first appeared in Poetry in February 1992, when the magazine published five of her poems. The accomplishment remains a highlight of her writing career. In all, Poetry has published more than a dozen of her pieces. One of her poems, "From Ruin," shares space alongside works by Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot and W.S. Merwin in "The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002."

His hand on my thigh

She hadn't set out to be a poet. In college, she studied visual art, but dropped out when her mother fell sick. Back in Alabama, she fell in love with a Yankee, a Navy officer named Bill Suk. They married when she was 20 and moved to a split-level house in Charlotte in 1966. She still lives there.

She was in her 40s, a mother of three, when she finally began writing poetry, inspired, she says, by the Nobel Prize-winning work of Saint-John Perse. His poems "lit the fire," she says, "but it was ready to be lit. I just got turned on."

You can see glimpses of Suk's life in her poetry. There's Bill, her husband of more than 50 years, as he lay dying following a long illness, his sour flesh / no longer firm in my arms. There's her father's reunion with the World War I soldier who saved him on the battlefield: Crying, they embraced - life is so sweet / when death is on leave.

And there's Suk as a teenager, sneaking into a tent revival with a boy who put his hand on my thigh / and rubbed on up.

Maybe that last line really happened. Maybe it didn't. Lots of sensual and even sexy images - breath on a neck, hands rippling on a body - populate her stanzas. She is coy about what is fact and what is fiction.

"To me," Suk explains, "poetry's sort of a collage. You snatch a memory and you paste it on a larger picture." Like a landscape painter, she rearranges trees and repositions mountains, adding and subtracting to create a larger truth.

"If I just wrote about my life," she says, "it would be so dull."

A nightmare

It's noon Friday, and though the menu is bring-your-own sandwiches, Suk has set her kitchen table with china plates, crystal goblets and forks with "S" monograms. There's no tablecloth. Note-taking is easier on a hard surface.

By 12:30, members of her weekly critique group - Dannye Romine Powell, Dede Wilson, Lucinda Grey and Hooper - have gathered in her kitchen. Only Susan Ludvigson is absent.

Together, these women have won dozens of literary prizes. They are friends. They are also each others' toughest editors.

The group has met for decades. Membership has evolved over the years, but it has always been all-female. Suk doesn't think men would care for their silliness or blunt critiques. "I don't think men like criticism as much," she says.

Before critiques begin, they eat and talk - about their math skills (poor), Cutco knives (high quality) and whether bright lipstick makes older women look better or worse (better, they hope).

Fresh Market cherry pie is consumed. Then lipstick is reapplied. "I can't read with dry lips," Suk says.

She passes out copies of a new poem, written, as is much of her work, in the middle of the night, when insomnia keeps her awake.

"A Nightmare," it begins:

broke into the house

my grandfather's house

I once owned and sold

crashed through

the window

glass and a cracked frame

and casually pulled back my covers. ...

Once Suk finishes, suggestions begin. Words are deleted, a comma inserted. The final line is cut. Suk makes notes on her copy with her pencil and vows to keep working on it.

"Did you have that nightmare?" Grey asks.

"Well, I sort of did," Suk says. But in the actual nightmare, there was a man in the room. She laughs. "I was so thrilled, having a dream like that."

I will take my memories

More than a few of Suk's poems contemplate death. No surprise, she says, "because I'm getting pretty close to it."

In one, she imagines her body "left for birds to clean." In another, she pictures the dead "without flesh, bones, hair," drifting unnoticed among the living, "longing for a bruise."

In "Loving to Death," she writes:

And I make New Year promises,

Including a few I'm sure to keep:

I will die.

I will take my memories with me,

I will leave survivors tossing in theirs.

Since hip surgery three years ago, she wears a bracelet with an emergency button she can press for help.

She has not pressed the button yet.

She turns 88 in March, and in her family, this is not so old. Her grandfather, the one in the poem who was propped up in his coffin, lived to 104.

Sometimes she claims her new book is her last.

"That's my whole life, in that book, from the very earliest writings," she says. "I told the (poetry) group you can stop hearing me whine about it, if I never have another book. Which I probably won't."

Then the next minute, she contemplates writing another.

Hooper hopes she does, "because what I'm seeing is very powerful."

At work in the dark

Suk continues to work nearly every day and also when she wakes in the night, as she did recently, about 3 a.m.

She turns on the bedside lamp, dons her robe, heads downstairs. In her study, bathed in the glow of her Mac, she plays with an image, which eventually becomes a line, then a stanza.

By the time the sun rises, she's back in bed, asleep.

But now on her computer, sharing space with birthday lists and bridge group phone numbers, she has written drafts of three new poems.