THE MAINE READER, edited by Charles and Samuella Shain, Houghton Mifflin, 149 pages, $29.95.

Anthologies have many purposes. Offering selections from a wide variety of writers within a particular genre or theme, they can whet the reader’s appetite for exploring the work of individual authors in greater depth. Anthologies also may help create collective understanding of a unique time and place and situate us in experiences that may confirm our beliefs or startle us with the new and unfamiliar.

The strongest sections in Charles and Samuella Shain’s new anthology, “The Maine Reader,” fall in the first category of confirmation and reminiscence of a Maine that is mostly past, and frequently nostalgic. The reader who hopes to find a potpourri of lively writing by the wealth of writers who now reside in the state will be disappointed. There are notable exceptions — novelist Carolyn Chute and poets Philip Booth, Bill Carpenter and David Walker are admirably represented — but generally “The Maine Reader” is focused on the past, where time already has made its selections.

If the anthology’s stated purpose had not been “simply to satisfy a reader’s urge to know Maine better,” there would be less reason to question the editors’ selection. However, since the Shains remark in the introduction that they “are impressed by the richness of Maine as a subject for writers” as they “look back over these reports of how Maine was and how it is now,” the reader expects the anthology to support the editors’ enthusiasm for both the past and the present.

In fact, only two authors born after 1945 are included in the anthology, while the majority of the pieces were written in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no work by native Americans and only one entry by a Franco-American. The Shains fare better with their selection of women writers, although they continue to choose the safe and famliliar: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Abbie Huston Evans. The anthology provides few other women writers of interest beyond the requisite excerpt by Carolyn Chute from “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.”

In addition, the Shains have an avowed bias toward southern and coastal Maine writers. Where are the central and northern Maine stories of Cathie Pelletier and Michael Kimball? Where is the Down East fiction of Sandy Phippen and Elaine Ford? Where are the extraordinary Maine poems of Eastport’s Heather McHugh and Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” immortalizing Castine and Blue Hill? Where is Leo Connellan, whose “Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country” won the Shelley Award? And where is Richard Eberhart, one of the most distinguished living world poets, who has written hundreds of poems about Maine? In many respects, “The Maine Reader” is as intriguing for what is missing as for what is inciuded in its ambitious attempt to illustrate the diversity of the Maine experience.

The Shains bring an unabashedly nostalgic eye to their task. “Maine’s slow entry into modern times has long been part of its attraction,” they write in the introduction. The implication is that writers live and work in Maine in order to escape the cities and suburbs, that writing may even be an escape for some of them. There are references to the “forgotten” people of Maine, rural poverty, the good fortune of Maine’s being left out of the industrial mainstream. Although the editors’ tone is intended as favorable toward “the Maine experience,” it reeks of solicitude and condescension. This patronizing attitude toward the cultural and economic realities of the state is reflected in the editors’ choice of selections which emphasize the pathos of the “poverty and human desolation in Maine.”

The gems in “The Maine Reader” are the lesser known works, which have not suffered from overexposure in numerous high school and college textbooks and anthologies. Wading through the memoirs and journals of early explorers and settlers, the reader will be amused by George F. Emery’s account of how and why the state was named “Maine” and not “Columbus.”

John West Haley’s contribution about how he became a member of the 17th Maine Volunteer Regiment for the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War is a detailed and vital piece of writing. Abstract painter Marsden Hartley was also a poet, and his homage to his hometown, “Lewiston Is a Pleasant Place,” is a celebration of childhood memories, evocation of place, and descriptive imagery. The inciusion of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s late poem “Ragged Island” is one of the strongest pieces of the anthology, and it will help to dispel the popular assumption that Millay wrote only tight, formal poems. Philip Booth’s three poems are taut, spare, and “make of what’s here/ what has to be made/ to make do.” Booth speaks for the best of the Maine writing in “The Maine Reader” when he says, “I learned here how language is inherently used. It is at its best in Maine.”

Minor deficiencies aside, “The Maine Reader” is rich in literary pleasures. There are deft portraits of fishermen’s wives, remarkable poems about roots and ancestors, and enticing memoirs of odd adventures and strange deliverances by early settlers. The editors’ choice, if not generous in contemporary selections, is an eloquent and persuasive commentary on the richness of Maine’s past.

Kathleen Lignell, a poet and editor of “The Eloquent Edge: 15 Maine Women Writers,” resides in Bucksport.