A KEEPER OF SHEEP, by William Carpenter, Milkweed Editions, 327 pages, $21.95.

William Carpenter, a Maine resident and professor of English at the College of the Atlantic, is best known for his poetry. His first book of poems, “The Hours of Morning,” won the Associated Writing Programs Award in 1980. His second, “Rain,” received the Morse Poetry Prize in 1985. After the publication of his third book, “Speaking Fire at Stones,” a collaborative book of poetry and drawings done with Robert Shetterly, Carpenter turned his attention to prose. The result is “A Keeper of Sheep,” his first novel.

The story begins and ends on the Dartmouth College campus in Hanover, N.H., but most of the action of the novel takes place in a fictional summer community on Cape Cod. The protagonist is a young feminist — Penelope Soltice — nicknamed “Penguin” for the livid birthmark which stained her shoulders and upper back, reminding her parents of the arctic animal.

When the novel opens, Penguin’s parents have divorced and both remarried, and she is faced with the consequences of an act of arson. She and two female friends have set fire to a campus fraternity house to protest the unpunished rape of a freshman woman by four Beta Sig brothers. It’s minor, as a revolutionary act, since the fire is extinguished before much damage occurs. To make matters worse, the official investigation involves the questioning of only a few radical campus males. When an outraged Penguin and her cohorts in crime march down to the local police station to confess to the act, they are expelled from college and receive suspended sentences.

Penguin then heads for the Cape and the shelter of her family’s summer home. She arrives to find that her father’s new bride, a former art student of his who’s just a few years older than Penguin, has turned her bedroom into a studio to house the metal arachnid sculptures which are her artistic speciality. When Penguin is asked to help a neighbor, “Uncle Joshua,” care for his gay lover — Arnold Fratorelli, a composer who’s suffering from AIDS — she agrees, grateful for the opportunity to spend some time away from her father’s newlywed love nest.

News of Arnold’s illness soon leaks out, and the specter of AIDS infects the summer colony. The horde of mosquitoes that perennially invades the area presents a lethal threat this year as residents become convinced that they will spread the deadly disease. Helicopters are hired to spray toxic chemicals and Joshua is asked to evict his house guest.

Carpenter interweaves several elements of the theme of intolerance in this tale. There is ecological intolerance as the summer residents resort to pesticides to rid themselves of mosquitoes. The reaction of others to the presence of a gay man suffering from AIDS reflects the blind intolerance and fear that often accompany this disease. This intolerance is presented in all its facets, from the religious platitudes that hide the underlying prejudice to the hatred bred of fear. The various men in the tale, from the rapist fraternity brothers to the local yokel who beds every available female and hits on Penguin repeatedly, bring up the issue of gender harassment and the failure of the sexes to tolerate and respect individual differences.

Penguin, with her disfiguring birthmark, is the perfect vehicle for the bridging of some of these intolerances. She paddles through the marshes, attempting to educate her predatory stepmother in the ways of the natural world. She devotes herself not only to Arnold’s care (at times a bit recklessly, from a disease-prevention standpoint) but also tries to convince the members of the community that they have nothing to fear from him and should allow him to live out his life in peace. It’s a losing battle, however. As Carpenter says through his protagonist, “It didn’t require the exchange of bodily fluids for the transmission of fear or panic; a phone call or cocktail party was all it took.”

The voice of a poet is evident in this novel. You hear it in the crisp choice of words, the inventive descriptions, the use of simile and metaphor to convey new images. Divorce becomes something that “would snort and rut around out in the corridor like the Thing, but it could not get in.” Discussions about AIDS “dissolved into the night air and became as invisible as the microbes they supposedly described.” Arnold in his illness is described as having a “suet-colored scalp” and hands with “fingery flight bones” like those of a pterodactyl. It’s easy to lose yourself in the language of this book.

Carpenter’s debut novel is ambitious in its scope, controversial in its subject matter, and elegant in its prose. It deserves a careful read.

Judy Eyerer is a free-lance writer from Bangor.