Poet in His Youth : CRUNCHING GRAVEL : Growing Up in the Thirties <i> by Robert Peters (Mercury House: $14.95; 122 pp.) </i>

California poet Robert Peters suspends a magnifier over his hometown, Eagle River, Wis., focusing in on boyhood--and on family scraping by during the Depression.

Chapters are notched by four unambiguous seasons, each one set off by taut and replete sketches that make us privy to day-to-day country doings. Recreation was doled out judiciously, hinging on farm chores and funds. Plenitude was known mainly as successful catches of fish and Welfare peanut butter.

The family maintained a rough-hewn homestead, farmed and stored vegetables, raised and slaughtered animals, hunted, fished and took on odd jobs. The children sold arbutus down at the train depot. The rigors of labor were interspersed with steadfastness and affection of family life--the thrills of Christmas, gathering around the Sears, Roebuck Silvertone radio, country fairs where the family pocketed $45 for their entries of pies, jams and pullets. Securing an Aladdin lamp to replace the sickly light of a single-wick for reading was an event.

Peters’ peripheral vision surveys school, bigotry, religion, just to name a few, and neighbors such as Mrs. Ohlson. She would sit outdoors scantily clad, with hair in tight rollers, and explain to the children about Armageddon Day on May 15, when at midnight the folks in her hometown back in Illinois perched on the church roof awaiting ascension to heaven. The moment never arrived, evidently forcing the folks to glissade off the roof. Mrs. Ohlson went back to Illinois. The author was sufficiently moved to seek baptism.

There were other rituals known to boys who went fishing at the lake, roughhoused by a campfire, discovered each other’s emerging manhood and ended the tribalism by beating and tossing toads into the flames.

The poet in Peters is evident--you can hear it in phrases such as “Since the quilt was too heavy to wash by hand, it accumulated much boy-soil,” “The dog stirred from his house. His face was rime white,” and “The spot was mud-luscious with dank, black soil.” (The latter harks back to E.E. Cummings’ Chansons Innocentes I: “in Just-spring when the world is mud-luscious the little lame balloonman . . . .”)

It may be that the author’s upbringing predisposed him to a terse style. Every sentence has traction. Passages are lean, limber and stripped of any sentimentality; some might find them harsh, in fact. Even poignant topics are handled with singular detachment. Consider this treatment of his father: “One morning at the Lincoln town dump, where he was the caretaker, he shot a stray dog, had a heart attack, fell into some flames, and died. He was only sixty.”

Peters scrutinizes his former turf with all the glare of an iceblink. His vignettes, rather than reflective, are downright raw-boned and angular. Not exactly the kind of tale you’d cozy up to, not without hurting yourself.