THE MAINE POEMS, by Leo Connellan, Blackberry Books, Nobleboro, 1999, 107 pages, $10.95.

Reading Leo Connellan under the best of circumstances is always a heart-rending experience. His dark, enigmatic poetry about abusive men, abused women, victimized men with no way out and the rhythmic impact of “the wild furious ocean” on Mainers’ lives hits very close to home. There’s little to celebrate in his hardscrabble themes, but much to praise in his brilliant candor.

The Rockland native learned his craft well as a free spirit drifting through Greenwich Village in the late 1940s with the likes of Dylan Thomas, and in San Francisco where he knew poet and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Sanford Phippen, Maine author and teacher, writes in his preface to Connellan’s 15th book, the first devoted solely to Maine themes, that the pain of loss permeates these poems: the loss of Connellan’s mother, who died when he was 7; the loss of family and friends; the loss of home; and the loss of Maine, which he left at 19.

Connellan’s Maine poems, written between the 1950s and the 1990s, are chock-full of references to the native ostracized from “Lime City,” his sardonic moniker for Rockland, where the brilliant, sensitive young man never really fit in with the fishermen and auto mechanics.

Soon to turn 71, and presently on a poetry-reading tour of Rockland, Orono and Brunswick, Connellan, the poet laureate of Connecticut, has reason to be proud of his latest book. It’s a slim volume (I read it in two half-hour sittings), but editor Gary Lawless skillfully gives the poet’s work body and form; ranging from the strange 11-line “Garbage Truck” about “piled up truths” and “canned dead things” to the 10-page centerpiece “By the Blue Sea” about a man who “always smelled of gasoline and fish” and his “Fish Woman,” who eventually leaves her husband and five boys for a different life in Boston.

Aside from being a first-rate storyteller, perhaps Connellan’s greatest strength is his use of dazzling imagery and his ability to pique the senses when the reader least expects it. The raw sexuality of a summer evening is depicted in the sweat of a hard-working man; the heavy smell of a sardine factory is synonymous with the stultifying confinement of life, especially a woman’s life, dependent upon the vagaries of the sea.

And then there’s death. Lots of it. Connellan seems obsessed with the theme, but in a curious way, he makes it life-affirming. (Phippen recalls his telling him once, “I drank myself to death but I lived,” an allusion to old habits conquered and finding new meaning in his old age.) There are poems about seaside cemeteries, grisly automobile wrecks, and one about an old friend. “Edwin Coombs is dead./ I just saw him./ And I talked to him on the telephone./ But he’s dead.”

Connellan even sees death and imprisonment in lobster fishing; and the sea — the cruel old sea — is forever waiting to claim another hapless fisherman as he sets out to feed his family.

The poems here aren’t all doom and gloom. Connellan’s morbid humor shines in his ode to Old Orchard Beach, whose devastating fire years ago prompted a poem alluding to “donkey cart rides in dark underground tunnels,” “French Canadians starving for a sea,” and “a luncheonette on the corner of Grand Avenue that served big thick mayonnaise pickle crab-meat sandwiches squirting out the side of the bread.”

That’s great stuff for a Maine boy who never graduated from college. I hope his current Maine tour isn’t his last, and that more regional poems will follow with the same dead-on portrayal of life here.

Leo Connellan’s schedule of Maine appearances: 7 p.m. Oct. 15, speaking and reading at the new Lincoln Center in Rockland; 1-2:30 p.m. Oct. 16, book signing at the Reading Corner Book Store in Rockland; 7 p.m. Oct. 18, reading at Orono Public Library; 4:15 p.m. Oct. 19, reading at Neville Hall, Room 100, University of Maine, Orono; and 4 p.m. Oct. 20, reading at Bowdoin College.