Mainer’s ‘Center Cut’ is gripping new fiction

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by authors set in the Pine Tree State or with other local ties.

CENTER CUT, by John R. Corrigan, University Press of New England, Lebanon, N.H., 2004, 281 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

The Presque Isle author has returned for another round with his Jack Austin mystery series.

Like “Cut Shot” and “Snap Hook” before it, “Center Cut” centers around the journeyman golfer and his life on the PGA tour. He has discovered there are much more dangerous things than water hazards and bunkers around a golf course, and this time around is no exception.

Dyslexic, Jack has found a home in the ordered sport of golf. But after a decade on the pro tour, Jack finds himself in the worst slump of his career, missing cut after cut. Everyone, from his gay black caddy to his legendary coach to his hard-working father, has a theory why. Could it be just missing his first tour win the year before, or the fact that he’s married with a baby daughter now and doesn’t want to leave them behind to go on the road?

Anyway, Jack has enough on his plate without getting involved in a mystery with a beautiful blond golfer’s wife at its core. Yet that’s where he and his friend Perkins, a security consultant for the tour, soon find themselves.

Corrigan does a masterful job of making the PGA tour and the mechanics of the sport accessible even to the nongolfer. Too esoteric a book could have left many in the clubhouse rather than out on the course where Corrigan wants them, but he avoids that sand trap.

Also, Corrigan is to be commended for not tying up everything neatly. “Center Cut” is rooted in reality, where there’s not too many happy endings. Still, it’s a satisfying, gripping read from this up-and-coming author. – Dale McGarrigle

THE BREATH OF PARTED LIPS: VOICES FROM THE ROBERT FROST PLACE VOLUME II, edited by Sydney Lea; CavanKerry Press Ltd., Fort Lee, N.J., 2004; 526 pages, paperback, $28.

In the 1930s, Robert Frost was asked what he thought of the federal public works program employing 600 poets to utilize their skills around the country. Frost replied that there had not been 600 poets in all of history.

“The Breath of Parted Lips” features a poem or two by more than 170 poets who at one time or another attended or led workshops at “the Frost Place,” the farmhouse in Franconia, N.H., where Frost once lived and which now is used as a literary conference center. Sydney Lea, in his introduction to the book, explains that Frost Place events differ from other writers conferences where he has seen “almost as much to chagrin me as I have to encourage,” and he emphasizes that the “politics and networking” that prevail in today’s poetry-making circles are: “Not at the Frost Place.”

To disabuse everyone of the idea that politics might be involved in his anthology selections, Lea democratizes things by arranging the works alphabetically by the workers’ names. This is meant “to confute all imaginable hierarchical schemes,” although he goes on to say that “not everything here is equal after all.” Presumably, all poets are equal but some poets are more equal than others.

It doesn’t matter. Overall, the 460 pages of poems do not differ much in their ranges of emotion – mostly variations of subdued reflection or of sociopolitical indignation – and they’re characterized by the same unsound sense of rhythm that writing workshops produce all over America. These pages are filled with precision grammatical instruments that no human being would ever utter. Which is to say, there’s little to set “The Breath of Parted Lips” apart from most other literary reviews and anthologies of the last 30 years.

There are exceptions, of course. Interspersed with “persons whose poems have never been published” appear, for example, Galway Kinnell and NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. Maine’s poet laureate, Baron Wormser, gets special mention and an extra selection. Other Maine-connected writers included are (in nonhierarchical order) Carl Little, Heather McHugh, Jacqueline Michaud, Karen Douglass, Sophie Hughes, Wesley McNair and William Carpenter.

The vast majority of the poems in this anthology are unremarkable, like most of the commodities churned from the university poetry mills. And Sydney Lea’s introductory apology, by its feeble effort to separate the Frost Plant from the rest of the industry, proves that some of the reasons for faint product quality are well-known. This book offers a big surplus of what has oft been thought and mindlessly re-expressed in the last 30 years. It does help make about 170 workers more employable, though. – Dana Wilde