PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla.

LAST weekend at the Gardens, a bustling mall about a 40-minute drive from gilded Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, it was Saturday business as usual. Thousands were there to escape the scorching Florida humdrum. The lines at Starbucks were endless, and even the staid bastion of Brooks Brothers was charged with the energy of a country club dance. A 25-percent-off sale for friends and family had brought fathers shopping with young sons, boyfriends with girlfriends, boyfriends with boyfriends, mothers and sons and — over by the pleated pants — a retired couple agreeing to disagree over the combination of green and brown.

In the center of it all towered Spencer Reece, 40, the store's assistant manager. If you had not overheard one of the regular customers asking about his recently published book of poems, on sale at the nearby Waldenbooks, you would not have noticed this mild-mannered gentleman in Brooks Brothers mufti.

And his story would go untold: After some 23 years of rejection and struggle, of submissions to The New Yorker and largely unacknowledged entries to assorted literary competitions, Mr. Reece published his first volume of poetry last month.

"I came home one night from Brooks Brothers, and the message was on the machine," said Mr. Reece, recalling the day, a little over a year ago, when he learned his luck had changed. "It was from Louise Glück," he continued. Ms. Glück is now the United States poet laureate.

He returned the call to learn that he had won the Bakeless Prize for new authors awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College. In addition to earning him a fellowship to the conference, which he will attend this summer, the prize also meant that "The Clerk's Tale," the collection of poems he had submitted, would be published by Mariner, a division of Houghton Mifflin. Mr. Reece couldn't believe it. He had been submitting material to the competition practically every year for at least a decade.

To celebrate his success, Ellen Morris, the Brooks Brothers manager, gave a surprise party for Mr. Reece before his first trip north to meet his book's publishers.

Soon after hearing from Ms. Glück, Mr. Reece got another important call. "It was Alice Quinn, the poetry editor for The New Yorker. She called me here," Mr. Reece reported. "And she said The New Yorker was going to take one of the poems. That was another shocker."

In fact, in an unusual move last June, the magazine devoted its entire back page to "The Clerk's Tale," the title poem in Mr. Reece's collection. The poem is set at the Brooks Brothers store in the Mall of America near Minneapolis, where Mr. Reece worked for a year and a half before moving to Florida in 1997. It portrays, as does much of Mr. Reece's poetry, the interior lives and routines of the kind of people society tends to overlook. In this poem, they sell clothes at the mall.

A few late customers gawk in at us.

We say nothing. Our silence will not be breached.

The lights go off, one by one — the dressing room lights, the mirror lights.

Then it is very late. How late? Eleven?

We move to the gate. It goes up.

The gate's grating checkers our cheeks.

This is the Mall of America.

Ms. Glück, writing in the foreword of Mr. Reece's book, describes his poetry as "half cocktail party, half passion play."

"We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making," she continues, "nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence."

From nothing to something quite extraordinary in the poetry world, Mr. Reece now spends his vacation days giving readings. His first was at no less esteemed a venue than the Library of Congress (he wore a Brooks Brothers suit, of course), which recently awarded Mr. Reece a $10,000 fellowship.

"That's a lot of money," Mr. Reece said. Especially for a poet. It allowed him to pay some bills and put money down to buy his apartment — not grand, not waterfront — in Lantana, south of Palm Beach.

The lives of most poets, or those without trust funds, are not easy. The typical advance for a book of poetry, according to Publisher's Weekly, is about $1,000, and a typical print run is about 1,500 copies. So most poets keep their day jobs. Many teach, but there are exceptions. T. S. Eliot had his job at a bank; Mr. Reece has Brooks Brothers.

He began working there about eight years ago as a salesman. He said he did a record half a million dollars in sales for the company in his first year, not bad for a poet, not bad for anyone. "It grounds me," he said, as he helped a large customer find the best fit in a linen sports jacket with small checks.

Finally, it was closing time. After counting all the money from the day's sales ("It was a very good day; we were so busy," Mr. Reece said) and preparing the payroll for the week, the poet car-pooled with a colleague home to his unassuming digs in Lantana.

No TV. Electric typewriter. Photographs and letters from friends in frames on the walls. The Philip Glass soundtrack from the film "The Hours" played on a CD player that skipped. Having changed from his establishmentarian work clothes into a pair of Madras shorts, a blue Nike T-shirt, and Ralph Lauren flip-flops, Mr. Reece now looked boyish.

During dinner at the Friendly Greek, a do-drop-in kind of place near his apartment in Lantana, Mr. Reece told his story, a painful one. Having attended Bowdoin College, transferring to Wesleyan, where he graduated, and studying at Harvard Divinity School with thoughts of becoming a hospital chaplain, Mr. Reece returned to his family's Minnesota farm and edited medical newsletters for his father, a doctor.

A friend encouraged him to keep writing poetry, even as Mr. Reece and his family entered into a contentious battle, over, among other things, his homosexuality. Their conflict forced him from his home. He said their estrangement continues to this day.

"I couldn't come to terms with leaving the farm," Mr. Reece said. He had a breakdown and was hospitalized, he said, in "a lockup. I didn't know what was ahead. I had no money. All I had was this education, and my poetry." Mr. Reece paused. "Then I got lucky in the hospital and I met this wonderful nurse. I recited her a poem and we became friends."

It wasn't one of his poems, he said; it was "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop. It begins, "The art of losing isn't hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster."

When Mr. Reece left the hospital, he lived with the nurse and her husband and looked for work. Brooks Brothers at the Mall of America hired him without any significant sales experience. About a year and a half later, he moved to Florida.

The poet then paused and began to sip his iced tea. Mr. Reece has not taken alcohol since he was 23 because, he said, his family has a history of problem drinking. "I did not want to become an extra in a version of Eugene O'Neill's `Long Day's Journey Into Night,' " he said.

He cleaned his plate. "The job at Brooks Brothers is what helped get me back on my feet," he said. "I like it here. We're a family." Even if he were offered a prestigious teaching position, he said, he would not leave.

It is not the fashion of the place, but the tradition that appeals to him.

Nor is it the money. As a manager, he said, "I no longer work on commission, but if the store does well there is the possibility of a bonus." Mr. Reece earns about $30,000 a year, he said.

The luck of being published, and in such a substantial way, is good fortune enough for Mr. Reece. He quoted a friend: "It is a case of don't quit before the miracle," he said. "I can't believe this is happening. It doesn't seem possible. Is it possible? People will read my poetry?"

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