THE BLUESTONE WALK: POEMS by Edward Nobles, Persea Books, New York, 2000, 96 pages, trade paperback, $14.

Ed Nobles used to be a stonemason. It was slow, labor-intensive work. At the time he also wrote poetry, and maybe the similarities between the two occupations were too great to bear, so he stopped building walls and turned his main attention to writing.

Writing poems, like building walls, is a process of fitting unlike things together — fitting words together, and sensibilities, emotions, ideas. It’s difficult work, and it doesn’t pay much.

For a long time, in fact, it didn’t pay Nobles anything at all. He earned a master’s of fine arts in creative writing at the University of Arizona, lived in his native Massachusetts, then New Hampshire, and finally moved to Bangor about seven years ago. He wrote poems continuously, sometimes seeing them published in prestigious journals such as The Paris Review. After years of submissions, his first book of poems, “Through One Tear,” was published in 1997 to favorable reviews from notable poets in America’s academic literary scene.

For Ed Nobles, writing has an inner importance that clearly transcends financial reward. It concerns not production, but a search of the unknown. “It takes me beyond myself,” he says.

If the poems in “The Bluestone Walk” have taken Ed Nobles beyond himself, they certainly will take readers beyond themselves. The book’s world is dreamlike, a place where seemingly unrelated events and images are fitted together, under the hew and stress of words, to create the emotions of those relationships.

This makes for heavy poetic going. Most of the poems begin with a carefully depicted everyday situation, such as an oak fire in “A Pattern of Wealth” or a “Sound from the thicket,/lush with night” in “At the Sanctuary.” They work methodically through patterns of imagery which usually are linked not linearly by chronology or reason, but by the logic of metaphor, the way images in dreams are linked, and end with a precise, often quirky statement of the emotional complexity of the relationships described.

“Contention,” for example, begins with images of stonewall building:

The base stones toe a rugged line.

Moss-stained and spud round

from eruptions of weather, the upper

rows hold, steadied by chinks

The poem goes on to observe: “Four ton of stone/contracts to four feet of wall,” and then describes the care that must be taken to ensure every stone is hewn to the tightest fit. Soon we realize the poem is progressing through a day’s activity, and in the last stanza the speaker says: “I’ll work all night, beyond/it, if it takes, beyond time,” signaling we have moved beyond the material of the realm of rocks, and into the inner world of time, desire and will. A few lines later, the poem ends:

My muscles ache; my spirit, walled,

still loves. Love, with all

it waste, stacks

its labor against my work.

Hearing this, we know we can read — or reread — the wall-building as an unusual form of the processes and labors of love; but the feeling is far more complex than “love is hard but worthwhile work.” If the poet’s comments can be believed, this love is related to the labor of making poems, too. This is how Ed Nobles, as he puts it, “tries to get at the emotion of things.”

In the book’s second section a dozen poems depict dreamlike responses to pictures in magazines such as Astronomy, Field & Stream, and World Art. These poems travel paths similar to others, and the emotions they get at are generated from magazine images. A world where such peculiar emotions can be scrutinized with this level of intensity is a world unfamiliar to the everyday life of paying bills, driving to work, or even building a stonewall.

And yet, magazine images are everyday experiences, too. “Everyone has a moment in every day that is strange,” Nobles says, and these poems explore the strange inner moments pictures can trigger.

They are extraordinarily well-crafted poems, by contemporary standards. The poet’s intense care for language and precise — and honest — phrasing is evident in every line of “The Bluestone Walk,” and has rightly earned him praise from high literary places. These poems pull few punches even at unsavory moments. They are not easy poems, and fall into a category of poetry that is unconventionally metaphorical and gorgeously unorthodox in diction and approach, a category that includes, among few other poets, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.

Readers familiar with the rugged linguistic terrain of much 20th century poetry will find “The Bluestone Walk” worth the journey, and will appreciate this poet’s care, craft, and willingness to labor. These are not what you’d call light poems, though, and readers who like their poetry stuffed with daffodils and clouds are apt to feel stonewalled. The reading, like the writing, is labor-intensive, and therein lies the reward.