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Like any writer, poets often mine their childhoods and youth for material.

And because memory never seems to run dry, and there’s always another way to tell even the same story, the past can be an endlessly renewable resource.

So while Jim Daniels notes that one-third of the poems of his new book “Late Invocation for Magic” (Michigan State University Press) are set in Pittsburgh, where he spent most of his adult life, even more of them harken to his hometown of Detroit in the 1960s and early ’70s.

“I keep coming back to some of the same subjects and themes,” acknowledges Daniels, who in 2021 retired after 40 years as a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University. He quotes novelist and screenwriter Richard Price: “Where you’re from is like the ZIP code of your heart.”

So here are poems about Daniels’ mother keeping leftovers warm for his auto-plant-worker father; his mother’s final illness and death; his own youthful immersions in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; a jock-friendly high school class called “Outdoor Chef”; and the role that the novelty known as the Super Ball played in (not quite) mourning his grandmother.

The title poem, meanwhile, humorously evokes he and his friends’ youthful skepticism about magicians, rooted in “our lack of expectation about the future.”

“The attitudes that we developed when we were still kids are still there,” Daniels says.

Even some poems recalling more recent events take place back home, like “Brushing Teeth With My Sister After the Wake”: “In our fifties, both / half-asleep half-awake, we face each / other. My sister’s smile foams white / down her chin at the end of a day / on which no one has smiled. We laugh. / We may never brush our teeth together again.”

Of the 75 or so poems in the book, 20 are new and previously unpublished, Daniels says. Rather than arranging them chronologically, or by the books they first appeared in, he organized the new collection thematically. Some poems explore fatherhood and his teaching career. He continues to teach in a low-residency program at his alma mater, Alma College.

Wherever he goes, it seems, the past knocks. At a recent reading at Alma, attendees included an old girlfriend and a former co-worker at a local “party store” (Michigan-ese for liquor shop) where he was employed decades ago.

Daniels, who’s published more than 30 poetry collections and several volumes of short fiction, turns 70 this year. He expects “Late Invocation” will be his final “new and selected” (the last one was in 2003). But who knows: His father died in January, at 96. Visiting the retired factory hand during his final months, Daniels summoned memories by simply driving around the old neighborhood. More flooded in at the funeral.

The very night he drove home from Detroit, he did a Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures reading for the new book at Carnegie Lecture Hall. People showed up he hadn’t seen in decades. “In a way,” he says, “it was like the visitation at the funeral home.”