Short round

Lewis Robinson’s Officer Friendly

By John Freeman

Officer Friendly and Other Stories By Lewis Robinson, Harper; 228 pages; $23.95.

Lewis Robinson reads at Bookland, in Brunswick, Jan. 18. Call (207) 725-2313.

FRIENDLY AUTHOR: Portland's Lewis Robinson

Every so often a new voice emerges, bringing a place so vividly to life a reader will want to stop what they’re doing and look it up on a map, as if longitude and latitude could explain the magic of fiction. Lewis Robinson’s debut collection, Officer Friendly, is just that kind of book. Set in Point Allison, a small town several hours north of Portland — don’t look, you won’t find it — these stories conjure life in the part of Maine we love to visit during the summer months, but stay the hell away from during winter time.

Among the heroes of these nine stories are a budding filmmaker, two high-school hockey players, several professionals making their obligatory visits home, an amateur boxer, and a few nice young men who, for better or for worse, have stuck around Point Allison — there are hints of In the Bedroom here — and are just a good woman away from happiness.

All of them want something more out of life, be it a lover or closer ties to their parents, but not all of them get it. The narrator of “Ride” finds himself an accomplice to his father’s half-baked scheme to smuggle art into Canada. After a close call at the border, the young man begins to understand the limitations his father’s flakiness imposes on their relationship. Another story, “Eiders,” refracts the bitterness of a divorce through a father-son trip duck hunting.

Robinson, who grew up in Maine and lives in Portland now, must know of what he writes, for he does a superb job dramatizing the tidal ebbing of father-son bonds. He understands the way small-town life magnifies the consequences of life decisions — to stay or go, to follow in the footsteps of one’s dad, or to break out and do something new.

The collection’s best piece, “Seeing the World,” combines all of these elements: A fatherless high-school graduate falls in with a 35-year-old loser, whom he thinks can show him the world. When the man fleeces him for cash, the narrator realizes that, in the absence of a father, the only person he can count on is himself. It’s a familiar lesson, but the way Robinson draws it out here it feels as if we learn it all over again.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com.

Far, far away While the trend in publishing fiction these days is to “discover” novelists before they develop whiskers, in the world of poetry, spoils go to those who wait. Three of the last five winners of the National Book Award have been over 70 years of age, while this year’s winner, Vermont poet Ruth Stone, is entering her 88th year. Accepting the award for her collection In the Next Galaxy, Stone joked, “You just gave me this to me because I’m old.” Whether motivated by respect for their elders or awe, it is clear In the Next Galaxy is a most deserving choice. To read the 85 short poems assembled here is to cheat time, so attentively does Stone compress moments and memories into imagery. Several poems dredge up afternoons of seven or eight decades vintage as if they occurred yesterday. “Reading the Russians” depicts Stone at 14, spending a summer “lying stomach down on my bed . . . a library book flat under my right thumb,/ slant of sunxmoment by moment across the window, my heart/ rushing with the wolves, the exhausted horses,/ the overturned sleighs.” Not all the memories she hits upon possess such golden light. “Reality” describes “the absurd corpse” of the poet’s husband after his autopsy, as well as the poet’s reaction: “All that sprang up in him so mortal, so beautiful; come to this.” Two other verses recall the fate of a man who hung himself. In fact, many of the poems in Stone’s collection meditate on impermanence, memory, and the passage of time. The collection’s gem, “Rising,” likens this awareness to erosion. “How mild the evening is,” she writes, describing a row of homes along a shore, CNo one would suppose/ that the house is going out with the tide.” For all the wintry melancholy such poems evoke, there is nothing self-pitying or morbid about them. Stone writes simply and elegantly. Her line breaks are neither fancy nor casual; her economy of metaphor is precise. One poem describes the life of an old woman thusly: “The children no longer visit. The cat holds all the threads of her detonated psyche.” And yet there is a muscular verbal movement in these poems that belies their creator’s age. They want, curse, and mourn unfinished mends with the past. The collection’s title hints at this refusal to stop dreaming, even after eight decades of observing how humankind rarely changes. Perhaps one day Stone’s wild dreams of a better world will come true. For the meantime, though, she seems content to sing the virtues of this fallen world, finding beauty in sleepy winter towns and the forgotten souls who people their bus stations. —JF