With each new album, Suzanne Vega gets stronger. Days of Open Hand is her hardest and loveliest music yet; it is distinguished by a prayerful intensity and a clean, sharp intelligence that announce a young artist fully come into her own.

Suzanne Vega, the singer-songwriter's 1985 debut, was all watercolor suggestiveness. Its pastel tunes sketched out keener melodies to come, and its lyrics – about a sense of looming psychic threat, the thawing of winter, the possibility of hope – grabbed almost randomly at meaning. Solitude Standing, two years later, was more focused, her words achieving mystic force ("Her palm is split with a flower with a flame"), her music gaining punch from a band whose four members proved fit, resourceful collaborators. The haunting "Luka," with its unflinching look at violence against children and its tough black-and-white video, not only clarified Vega's vision but distanced her from the softer side of the folk resurgence she'd helped spark.

With Days of Open Hand, Vega assumes her place in the folk tradition as an individual talent. Bob Dylan did it when he moved from the offhand plain speaking of folk songs into a denser folk rock, his lyrics courting a wild obscurity in his driven search of a more personal voice. Vega's record takes a similar leap; she's now beyond borders, making an unaffected art music that's heady, heartfelt, very demanding – and very rewarding.

"Tired of Sleeping," a crunchy waltz, begins the album's dance. "Oh mom/The dreams are not so bad/It's just that there's so much to do/And I'm tired of sleeping," Vega sings, ushering in a keynote theme of hesitant affirmation and surreal truth. The words get stranger – "That man he ripped out his lining/Tore out a piece of his body/To show us his 'clean quilted heart'" – as Vega unveils her music's more spiritual concerns, its accounts of lives impelled by occult gestures and wounded stabs at saving ritual.

"Institution Green," a slow, discordant number about madness; "Men in a War," about amputation, loss and remembrance; and "Fifty-Fifty Chance," about a failed suicide, form a suite of songs astonishing for their cleareyed gaze at pain. Such poets as Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith come to mind. Vega shares their gift for the tense physical image ("If your nerve is cut/If you're kept on a stretch") and shares, too, their skill at shifting from an elegant, deadpan compassion to direct, heartbreaking pity: "I tell you/I love you/I sing to you/Bring to you/Anything."

Days of Open Hand isn't as catchy as Solitude Standing, but its subtler melodies are economical and effortless. When Vega rocks ("Men in a War," "Book of Dreams"), she's looser and more convincing than in the past; her band cooks up a pleasing, knowing pop that recalls a defter Velvet Underground or a controlled early Patti Smith. With keyboardist and co-writer Anton Sanko at the helm, the players are masters of texture, joining with guest musicians (on strings, marimba, accordion, Chinese drum and other instruments) to produce dramatic fields of sound. Their worldly muscularity kicks up Vega's deliberately naive singing; they add a smoky cunning to the morning purity of her ethereal, childlike vocals, skillfully highlighting the latent eroticism of her hypnotic delivery. And Vega's voice has never been so moving; particularly when accompanied by her own multitracked singing or backed by Shawn Colvin, she sounds like an earthangel choir.

This incantatory spirit makes for music that, while not overtly religious, surely urges toward transcendence. Vega is a Buddhist, and it may be the strict beauty of that most riddling of faiths that lends her poetry its clear but complex grace. Certainly she understands life, in general, as a sacramental means. When, in "Predictions," she sings, "Let's tell the future ... By salt. By dice/By meal. By mice/By dough of cakes/By sacrificial fire," her aim isn't merely theatrical, a moody evocation of Macbeth: She is also disclosing a sense of the world as wonder, as revelation.

Hinting, then, at the mystery at the heart of life while rightly heeding the signs of hurt and hope in actual rooms and cities, Suzanne Vega's Days of Open Hand is music on the edges – the edges of redemptive meaning, tears and wisdom. (RS 576)

PAUL EVANS