&;Drop the personal,&; Alan Feldman&;s best friend advises. But what else does he have? Feldman takes his title from Zhivago&;s interpretations of the afterlife: &;Your soul, your immortality, your life in others.&;             In a collection where the dead do speak, Feldman&;s poems in his first segment, &;Self-Portraits,&; are more likely to be about others than about himself. The segment &;Partners&; reflects on marriage and divorce, the latter an &;uncontested victor over marriage, / the way the flood is champion over the flood plain.&; In the section &;Offshore&; Feldman writes about travel to Uruguay, his impractical love of sailing, and his wonder at Walter Cronkite&;s obtuseness about Vietnam. In his final segment, &;What Now?,&; he asks about meaning itself. Babysitting his tiny granddaughter, he thinks of sailing&;hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror&;and wonders if even this suggests something world-encompassing he&;s &;still hoping to find a name for. / If it isn&;t joy.&; Winner of the Mass Book Award for Poetry, Massachusetts Center for the Book