“Food is a help/for all poets/take their meals/where and when/they find them.”

– Kendall Merriam, “Comments on Chinese Poetry”

American poets have been infatuated with Chinese poetry dating at least to the early 20th century when Ezra Pound published “Cathay.” Kenneth Rexroth later fed the fire with his “100 Poems from the Chinese.” Poets such as James Wright openly emulated the relaxed flow, leaps and humor of the bards of the Far East in poems such as, “As I step over a puddle at the end of winter, I think of a Chinese Governor,” found in his collection, “The Branch Will Not Break.”

Kendall Merriam joins this Sinophile line with “Spring River: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant,” published by Dancing Bear Press in the Sagadahoc County town of Richmond. He adds his own delightful and delicious twist: The 20 poems in this collection were written while dining at the Lucky Garden Restaurant in Hallowell.

Starting in January 2000, Merriam tells us in an afterword, “in need of a good muse” he began frequenting the restaurant, arriving midafternoon and ordering hot and sour soup and spring rolls. Each time, he asked the waiter, Danny, for two extra place mats, which were blank on the back – not exactly the rice paper of Li Po – but serviceable to his purpose. Under the influence of the restaurant, the food and a view of the Kennebec River, the poet wrote.

Merriam adopts the free-verse, colloquial style of Chinese poetry. He avoids punctuation except for the exclamation point, which ends several of these poems – a way of adding spirit to a final thought, as in the concluding lines of “At Last, Back in China.” Here, he pays homage to Pamola, presiding spirit of Ktaadn, after seeing several wild creatures during a climb on the mountain: “He made me tired, aching/but proud and humble seeing/holy spirits/so far from home!”

In “Sunday, The Day Before Valentine’s,” Merriam acknowledges his “living muse,” his wife, whose hair, he notes, was once cut like that of Jackie Kennedy and now resembles Hillary Clinton’s. “It is not that she changes with them/but they with her,” he points out. In the same poem, he recommends noontime love before Chinese food because it “makes it taste all the better/as if a special sauce/makes everything piquant/just as Valentine’s should.”

The beautiful “On My Father’s 88th Birthday” begins with a memory of skiing to a village “for cocoa and sausage” and ends with an image of the poet’s father falling asleep over the local newspaper “knowing the news hasn’t changed/in 88 years.” A reference in the poem to “Holy Rockland” brings to mind poets Allen Ginsberg, who proclaimed just about everything holy, and Leo Connellan, who, like Merriam, spent his early years in this small seaside city.

Like his Chinese counterparts, Merriam responds to the passing seasons, with a special eye for the Kennebec River and its changing demeanor. He also entertains leaps of thought, as when making a connection between O.O.M., Odyssey of the Mind, and Omon, the name of the Russian Internal Security troops, in “Going the Distance.”

The poems are all about 25 lines in length and are printed flush left and right across the page from each other. Each verse is dated, from 1/19/00 to 8/13/01, and carries the hour it was penned (Merriam acknowledges individuals for looking at various versions of the poems, so they were not completed in one sitting).

Fittingly, the book is dedicated to the owners, staff and cooks of the Lucky Garden Restaurant. “Surely, we are lucky here/in this indoor garden of peace,” Merriam writes in the poem “Summer River.” He wishes the whole world could dine here “for it would make the body smile.” And, we might add, the verse flow.

Carl Little is a poet and art critic who lives in the Mount Desert Island town of Somesville.