THE GREEN MACES OF AUTUMN: VOICES IN AN OLD MAINE HOUSE, by Lewis Turco, Mathom Bookstore, Dresden Mills, Maine, paperback, 67 pages, $7.95.

The tradition in American poetry of writing in the voice of individuals from earlier eras is a long and distinguished one. John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” Donald Junkins’ “The Agamenticus Poems,” Daniel Hoffman’s “Middens of the Tribe” and Kate Barnes’ “Four Victorian Coatsworths Speak from Their Graves” are just a few fine examples of poets turning to figures from the past for verse.

With “The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House,” Lewis Turco, poet and essayist, adds to this body of writings, drawing on the former inhabitants, fictitious and real, of his home in Dresden Mills, on the road between Gardiner and Head Tide.

Through a series of verse monologues, these individuals evoke the life of mill-town Maine. More specifically, they haunt the walls of the house built by Sylvester Gardiner in 1754, part of the Cate Farm, which has been in the Cate-Houdlette family going back several generations (Turco is married to Jean Cate Houdlette).

The title of each poem consists of a name and life and death dates, beginning with “John Bourne 1698-1761.” The poet serves as a medium for a diverse range of individuals: a man who was felled by an Indian’s arrow, another who died in World War I, a woman who flees south each winter – even an infant who perished at birth (“I remember, briefly, / a light flickering…”). Some of these ghosts relate history, as when Francis Pullen (1774-1779) describes the arduous march to Quebec with Matthew Arnold, which left him an amputee with a “leg of shadow.”

Turco is fond of the genitive construction: “sands of time,” “throat of solitude,” “ashes of desire,” etc. These somewhat cliched formulations are offset by original images and conceits, such as when the poet describes a summer feast at which “a bowl of steamers yawned and raised vapors” or when he refers to the spiny husks of the horse chestnut tree as the “green maces of autumn.”

In a foreword to the book, fellow poet Herbert Coursen of Brunswick describes Turco’s poetics as “splendidly crafted quantitative syllabics.” Sometimes called syllabic meter or syllabism, this kind of prosody uses syllables to build each line (practitioners in the last century included Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore). For example, “Albums,” a lovely invocation that begins the book, works in a repeated 6/9/11/10 syllable pattern – a somewhat unnatural way to versify, yet one that Turco, a master prosodist, manages to finesse.

At his best, in a poem like “Wesley Court, 1934-,” Turco manages to capture the house’s inner world. Lamps vamp against half-drawn shades, “gray slides from its mousehole” and “sashcords in loveknots hang in the windows.” In this closed universe, voices don’t change a great deal from century to century, but neither does the rich language.

Carl Little is a poet and art critic who lives in Somesville.