Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by authors who have Maine ties or whose work is set in the Pine Tree State.

THE ROAD WASHES OUT IN SPRING: A POET’S MEMOIR OF LIVING OFF THE GRID, by Baron Wormser; University Press of New England, Hanover, N.H., 2006; 200 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

Baron Wormser, Maine’s most recent ex-poet laureate, for years enjoyed, or navigated around, a reputation in local poetry circles for living off the beaten track. “The Road Washes Out in Spring” concretizes the lore in a long cycle of prose reflections on how that life began in the back-to-the-land movement as it could only have happened in Maine, and wended its way through the 1980s.

Like his poetry, Wormser’s prose is probing, simultaneously abstracted and detailed, and mostly exacting. The book comprises what must be about 60 little untitled essays of two to four pages each. Most depict what his life was like off the power grid, especially when, for example, it was cold outside or the driveway turned into mud. Many are Thoreau-derived passages on natural beauty, natural violence, and the backwoods-Maine characters who variously build, cook, kill, repair engines and cut trees, and their laconic, often wry disposition toward the people from away who live on a long dirt road without indoor plumbing. Some essays are autobiographical, always with a particular point or atmosphere. A lot of attention is given to how the outside world affects, and does not affect, what goes on in the woods of Somerset County. Reflections on the pleasures, complexities and powers of poetry read by kerosene lamp appear frequently.

Different readers will take to different topics. But the tone throughout is low-key, stolid (apparently the Maine woods rubbed off on the guy who grew up in Baltimore), even-tempered, and subtly good-humored. Shoveling snow, for example, “was more work than I cared to do at six o’clock on a very cold morning, but it reminded me once again that I was living on earth and not in some ever-convenient mental scenario” – a sentence that probably contains the book’s thematic quintessence.

Some passages are abstract verbal thickets that require a philosopher’s diligence and a diplomat’s forbearance to come to terms with. But the moments of head-scratching are mainly brief, and the next paragraph or essay always offers a sheen of backwoods imagery restful to think about.

“The Road Washes Out in Spring” is not a unique or even unusual book, but it is solidly what it is, and many Mainers, both native and transplanted, will see themselves or their fantasies reflected here, often pleasurably and sometimes uncomfortably. The polarity is a hallmark of Wormser’s accomplished writing. At present he is living in Hallowell.

CONFLUENCE: MERRYMEETING BAY, by Franklin Burroughs, photographs by Heather Perry; Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Maine, 2006; 214 pages, large format paperback, $30.

“Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay” is a very nicely made book containing essays written by retired Bowdoin College professor Franklin Burroughs and color photographs by Heather Perry, all centered on Merrymeeting Bay, the nearly landlocked confluence of the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers at Bath.

We learn upfront that Merrymeeting Bay is one of only four places in the world where two large rivers converge at their mouths. The others are in San Francisco, India and Iraq. This global thought is followed by local ruminations on hunting, fishing, fish (with lengthy discussions of salmon, carp, sturgeon and eels), turtles, boats, geography, birds, vegetation, resident characters, and so on. There are brief literary divagations (we learn the Abenaki word “sownago,” meaning eagle, is the anglicized root of place names using “swan,” as in Swans Island), and standard invocations of Thoreau, Audubon and Izaak Walton.

These essays offer exactly what is expected from the genre we call “nature writing.” They cover the requisite topics with a conservationist disposition, and uphold the last 30 years’ assumption in academia that everything is inescapably political, fertilizing natural history with proper pinches of PC; a passage on the Sept. 11 attacks is, not surprisingly, one of the book’s more moving moments. Since these essays are so thoroughly and meticulously what they’re supposed to be, some have been collected in big-time anthologies such as the “The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing.”

The mood of “Confluence” is unwaveringly calm and collected. It’s an afternoon nature walk in itself, ambling, exacting in both detail and generality, sometimes longer than you intended, fatiguing. The photographs are skillfully made and arranged, and beautiful. There are many less tidy books of its kind to display in the living room.

SUMMER LINES: A DECADE OF TENANTS HARBOR POETRY READINGS; Limerock Books, Thomaston, 2006; 84 pages, trade paperback, $12.

“Summer Lines” is one of those infrequent curiosities – a poetry anthology that’s worth more than the paper it’s printed on. It collects poems by five poets who either live or summer in the midcoast, and who starting in 1997 have made a seasonal tradition of giving group readings, first at the Jackson Memorial Library in Tenants Harbor, and then in the Martinsville Grange.

The five poets are Jonathan Aldrich, Mary Burchenal, Christopher Fahy, Elizabeth Gordon McKim and David Riley. Space does not allow mention of all the well-handled and touching poems printed here, but an unusual authenticity of feeling characterizes most of them. There is an uncommonly persistent care here for how diction, sound and rhythm shape moods, which range from playful, as in McKim’s “Maine Songs” (“Purple mussels sift/Silt in dark recesses of/Continental shelf”), to somber, as in Riley’s “For Bruce” which weaves a spell out of the complexities wars make of love, grief and time. Fahy’s lyric narratives must have provided entertaining readings. Burchenal’s poems exemplify a standard strand of highly self-reflective American poetry. Aldrich’s poems, which open the collection, are the most consistently sharp; “night: the water bearer” goes:

who is that man

between field and river

coattails flapping

skyward at the cold

close of january?

who is this man

who let the stars

fold over him?

The fact that distinct human moods even exist here sets this anthology apart from others. And there’s a strong sense, borne out in the clarity of feeling, that the book developed out of the poetry, rather than the poetry being manufactured out of the desire to publish a book. In other words, most of these poems feel genuine, not artificial. This is unusual. “Summer Lines” is a good book to keep on the coffee table. For actual reading, I mean, not show.

Dana Wilde can be reached at dwilde@bangordailynews.net.