TEMPLE, by George Dennison, edited by Geoffrey Gardner and Taylor Stoehr, Steerforth Press, 195 pages, $19.50.

Chuck: “Tall, slim, puzzled, suffering from the difficulties of life here (boredom and the terrible scarcity of jobs) and suffering especially from the failure of his marriage. He works slowly but steadily … and is so unhappy he can’t keep instructions straight in his head and wastes two hours in an error I specifically cautioned him about.”

Dana: “So sweet and cheerful, … a serene, sweet-natured man, at peace with the world and apparently totally accepting of himself.” Later, he “seems collapsed and desiccated. … His hands are misshapen, huge knuckles, fingers somewhat awry. They lie in his lap, a collection of bones in little bags of skin.”

Hewey: “Serious, considerate, responsible” but he “ages fast … because he works so hard and suffers the usual boredom. … It’s the lack of return, lack of pleasure, lack of excitement that drags them all down.”

Fife: His “dog is always chained — and actually somewhat expresses Mr. Fife’s relation to the world, i.e., embattled, surrounded by a strong fortress, protected by caution, sagacity, competence.”

Ronnie: “When he smiles … he looks boyish … — then he falls silent and his face takes on the mask of a man wrongfully injured, held down or imprisoned, plotting a violent revenge.”

For these men and others, it is the “dullness, narrowness of life, appalling sameness of days, disappointments, desperation, traces of bitterness, stirrings of a rage that never really breaks the surface — all this relieved in life by pursuits that are too good, too real, to be sacrificed by moving away: hunting, fishing, snowmobiling.”

It is in these sharply drawn character sketches of his neighbors, coupled with evocative glimpses of the natural world of rural Maine that George Dennison’s prose sparkles in this posthumously published “writer’s journal,” “Temple.” When Dennison died of cancer in 1987, friends Geoffrey Gardner and Taylor Stoehr gathered the scattered fragments of journal entries, nature studies and character portraits which were to be the basis of a comic epic novel and organized them to create a sort of literary omelet.

As such, “Temple” has wonderfully luscious ingredients hidden within its center, where one gains a real sense of truth and humanity, the ebb and flow of New England life, and the tenuous connections between humankind and the natural world. Its outer edges, though, disappoint: the opening journal entries which are brittle and dry, and the ending which reiterates the dull and boring sameness which seems to be at the heart of life.

But if one cuts through these frayed and bitter edges, there are some unexpectedly keen insights into human behavior and our connection to the land, the animals, the vegetation, the seasons — life in Maine. It is in his word portraits of his neighbors of Temple, Maine (just north of Farmington), and their unrelentingly difficult and dangerous lives — as farmers, lumberjacks, woodworkers, animal lovers and others — that George Dennison reveals his gifts as a writer. Like many transplanted Mainers, he admired the honesty, loyalty, resourcefulness, courage and perseverance, humor and kindness of the “good country people.”

Not unlike his prececessor, Robert Frost, Dennison came to love the beauties and, yes, even the violence, of nature in rural New England. He reveled in the solitude, the activities surrounding wood-cutting, fishing, canoeing, gardening, playing poker, etc. Yet there is an unrelenting sadness that seems to surround even the tenuous glimpses of joy and pleasure, sadness for the deterioration of the land, for human cruelty, for the loss of a simple way of life, for the death of men and women who take with them the culture, the lore, the beauty of an older generation who might save us from our headlong quest for “progress” and “efficiency.”

Dennison came from Pennsylvania and worked a variety of jobs, teaching and writing, and manual labor, and was famous for his acclaimed book of the free-school movement of the 1960s, “The Lives of Children,” as well as his stories. Steerforth Press is reissuing “Luisa Domic” and “Shawno,” a novel and novelette, as a companion to “Temple.” The first is a terrifying story of the intrusion of political terrorism into the “safe” and “carefree” life of rural New England, the other the story of a man and his beloved dog. Both show Dennison’s penchant for sculpting an emotional atmosphere out of the apparently chaotic flux of “real” life. One sees in “Temple” only rare glimmerings of the author’s earlier gift, and so one leaves “Temple” as Dennison must have felt — a bitter nostalgia for what could have been.

Linda L. Labin is an associate professor of English at Husson College.