A SENSE OF PLACE: COLLECTED MAINE POEMS, edited by Lillian B. Kennedy, Alice N. Persons and Nancy A. Henry; Bay River Press, Auburn, Maine, 2002; 99 pages, paperback, $7.

A cutout in the gray paper cover of “A Sense of Place” frames a reproduction of what must be a watercolor of a blueberry barren. It’s a pretty, realistic image of a landscape everyone who has driven Route 1 east of Bucksport has seen. A disorder, up a hill, of gray boulders in ragged grass, and a foreground of blueberry bushes gone red.

We learn on the copyright page that the book “is dedicated to all the people who love Maine.” The table of contents lists Maine place names in alphabetical order, from Arundel to Winslow, with poem titles in italics under each, and the next page dives without comment into the opening poem. It’s a neat, tidy little book.

About 27 poets contributed to “A Sense of Place,” some well-known, others not. H.R. Coursen, Rhea Cote-Robbins and Patricia Ranzoni will be recognized in various circles of Maine poetry, for example, and their poems, among some others, reveal that the editors have a fairly good ear for what present-day American poetry is expected to sound like. The diction, rhythm and sonic possibilities typical of contemporary verse are capably managed in many of the poems.

Annie Farnsworth’s “Property Lines” makes a good opening because it’s clear from the outset we’re reading lines handled with skill:

The old real estate adage recommends buying

the worst house in the nicest neighborhood,

and by that advice we become carbuncle

among cedar-shaked cabochons. We,

the dandelion danger zone

threatening their islands of green.

This is nearly the best the book has to offer. The tone is unusually cheerful, the words unfold with methodical precision of syntax and stress, and there’s even some play with alliterations and assonances – a warp and weft of consonant and vowel sounds – which in the past 30 years has seemed like a lost art. Coursen’s Brunswick sonnets are similarly well handled, as are Nancy Henry’s and Alice Person’s poems.

The selection’s most striking poem is Edith Cheitman’s Kents Hill offering, “Stewardship: The Dark Side.” Its lines too are skillfully made, but they differ from almost everything else in this book: They unleash real energy. Only the poems by Dennis Camire (notably “Slightly Retarded Bagboy Asking Out Check-out Girl, Wells Shopping Plaza”) seem to detonate anything the way Cheitman’s poem does, and this is partly because Camire is one of the few poets in the collection who reveals any aptitude for what we know as negative capability. His poems have characters.

Almost all the other poems in “A Sense of Place” have one character, the speaker, describing some incident or observation or landscape he or she hopes will seem deeply felt. There are the obligatory reflections on family photos; the beleaguered souls standing alone in dark fields; the sober statements of surprise at natural beauty; the microscopic inspections of common sentiments, such as closing up the cottage for summer, as if its bittersweetness were somehow any deeper than an April snowfall. What significance there is in Sarah Sousa’s line-fractured diary entry about walking around in fields is not known.

How these poems were selected is not known, either. Somehow the editors came upon verses about “Maine” – we’re not told how – and their ears were good enough to pick poems of some shapeliness but whose inner coherence is less apparent than that of boulders on a hillside. The book’s title is a cliche of literary studies, no cleverer than most of the poems, and the contents’ alphabetical order by town is as unimaginative as the tone of our age’s poetry – understated, serious, self-absorbed, squeaky clean, and drowsy. Have we been calling this poetry good for decades now merely because it’s better than TV?

If you have some experience of Maine, you won’t find much here you haven’t seen before, either driving past the blueberry barrens, or looking at watercolors in sidewalk art shows, or reading the last 25 years’ literary magazines.