BROTHERS OF MORNING, by Martin Steingesser, Deerbrook Editions, Cumberland, 2002, 73 pages, $12.

Coming to the end of Martin Steingesser’s new poetry collection, “Brothers of Morning,” I could almost smell the scent of the ripening warmth of Indian summer, that time of promise I remember feeling as a girl at the start of the new school year, the world brimming over with possibility and adventure. It was a lovely June day that I read this enticing, very personal book and still those intense qualities of autumn, its heartbreaking courage to be hopeful in the face of winter, overwhelmed the launch of summer.

Steingesser’s poems frequently carry references to the seasons. His intimate, spare “Night Letters,” is written in the icy cold, the verse-letters to an absent lover reflecting the etched clarity offered by winter’s abstinence. Other poems fling open the windows of spring. So this autumnal scent that I find is not only about the many references to fall, the way Steingesser talks about an Indian summer morning that “keeps fattening / on sunlight” in “Today, the Traffic Signals All Changed for Me,” or the determination we witness as “Blue sky rises in my blood, geese / and monarchs migrating through; my love’s an open field, / meadows of goldfinch, Anne’s lace, new moon / and crow laughing …”

It’s not even that the final poem, “Improvisation,” is set on a warm September day at Deer Isle’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, nor that other poems refer to the beacon of possibility offered by bright-yellow school buses, a hope so fervent that even the most reluctant kid kicking the dust with his blue backpack becomes a symbol of our faith in the future.

It’s more that these poems are themselves an autumn, full and round and somehow settled, the way a large pumpkin resting on the ground is an image of contentment. These poems have been honed and pruned and cared for. Steingesser sands the edges of his poems, polishes them until they are audible, even loud, picking references from the everyday world, inside the home and out. Bells, purple finches and mottled trout flit through these poems as he mulls love and loss, sewing a tapestry of the past 30 years both personally and globally.

Then, too, this first collection of poems appears in the Indian summer of the life of this poet who just turned 65 and has been writing long enough to be able to place poems that have been ripening for more than 25 years beside year-old babies.

“I’m not prolific, and that’s OK with me,” Steingesser said, speaking over the phone from his Portland apartment. “Writing is channeling and listening to my voice. What I can control is not the voice or the real material, but how well I can learn to translate. It’s kind of a dance.”

Raised in New York, Steingesser moved to Portland in 1981, then lived in Belfast from 1989 until he returned to Portland in 1997. Though Steingesser might find his written output slow, his sphere of connection is huge. From the time he arrived in Maine, Steingesser has been a kind of pied piper on two levels. On the ground level, he teaches poetry in the schools under the artist in residence program of the Maine Arts Commission.

In his title poem, “Brothers of Morning Brush My Eyes,” he casts himself as a wandering troubadour through “Hope, / Liberty, Palermo, South China, West Paris. . . .” On this morning he writes about, he’s singing his way across the state: “I’m a lucky man, afoot with a vision, tooling along … Now a red-tailed hawk, another – three! arpeggios of lift, brothers of morning.” What a hopeful poem! It’s fit for a man whose parade skills are as lofty as they are broad.

Steingesser’s other claim to fame is

as a tall – very tall – man. Look up at festivals such as the Common Ground Country Fair, the Old Port Fest in Portland, even in Rumford, and you’ll see Steingesser dancing, yes dancing, on stilts, a skill he uses to augment his poet’s income.

But clearly, teaching is closest to his heart. In another poem, he takes us into the classroom. “Whatever You Want” is a signature teaching poem, written as a conversation to a fourth-grade boy named Brandon: “‘In my poem,’ I say, ‘gorilla is spelled r-o-s-e.'” The boy is hesitant, but Steingesser doesn’t let him off, he knows how to entice a boy: “‘I spell Brandon, S-u-p-e-r-h-e-r-o.'” They launch into a word duel of dares: “‘Dirty recess,’ he says, heating up,/ beginning to sound like one of those beat poets. / I pitch again – ‘Cross-eyed sharpshooters.’ ‘Sumo wrestlers,’ he says, eyes narrowing.'” There’s an immersion in the moment; a sense of intensity and play underscored, always, by a belief in the future – of the boy, of the world.

This poem follows on another poem about collaboration, “Painting 101,” written for painter Abby Shahn. Here, she’s the leader, chasing the poet through a landscape of oils, ” black crosses flying over, small fires breaking out, / crop circles turning up, sudden riffs of stones” as they create a painting together and we sense the excitement, the intensity, the exhaustion of creation.

These poems are readily accessible, they are set, frequently, in a recognizable place, at a window, on a road, in a classroom, beginning at a time, he says, “where I catch myself thinking,” a time when he’s able to hear his voice. Over the years, he adds, he’s learned not only to be better at catching himself, in the creative process, but at that dance of translating the inner voice into actual phrases on paper.

“A lot of the time is not writing, my hardest work is what my culture calls doing nothing – it’s scary when I haven’t been doing it,” Steingeser said. “When I’ve been teaching, and have that external validation, then it’s hard to stop and do nothing. It’s like stuttering, I have to do it over and over. When I’m in stride or rhythm, it’s wonderful.”

You don’t have small talk with Steingesser; he immediately gets to the heart of things with a poet’s intensity, carefully choosing words. What he offers here is a lifetime of such choices, a range of joy and anger and desperation, a desire to make each day as essential as each word.

These are active poems, filled with the energy of living, whether it’s in the passion of consuming creation as in “Shoplifting Poetry,” or the wonderful love poems, which swoop first into desire only to find they must once again face loss. Here the poet is most vulnerable and so the poetry most effective as he rides waves of unmoderated feelings that baffle us all. “The woman in me is jealous How / do I live with you both” he asks in “The Voice I Want.” What a line!

Perhaps, there’s something more to the quality of Indian summer I perceive here, and that’s its bittersweetness, holding as it does both the fullness of summer and the other the bitterness of winter. Underlying Steingesser’s poetry, we find promise, a reminder that life is circular, that spring does come after winter. These love poems, especially, loose, questioning, exploring, moving, are ready for the future, a place from which to commence, to launch yet another arpeggio of poems. As he writes: “one night you woke from a dream, sat up and said: “‘Begin.'”

Martin Steingesser will be reading from his book, “Brothers of Morning” at the following locations: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 10, Belfast Free Library, 106 High St.; 2 p.m. Monday, Aug. 12, Bangor Public Library, 145 Harlow St.

Donna Gold is a free-lance writer from Stockton Springs.