CAMPFIRES OF THE DEAD <i> by Peter Christopher (Alfred A. Knopf: $15.95; 114 pp.)</i>

Struck with wonder and dense as poetry, the best of Peter Christopher’s short stories give form to the spiritual and emotional bonds that interconnect people. In “Blood and Seed,” for instance, a man uses painterly prose to depict his enduring affection for an old lover (“Shadowed lines, thumb-traced by God, parcel out your small ribs”), interweaving images of their lovemaking with scenes from his own life, such as the birth and growth of his children.

“Rosie and Della,” in turn, shows how we are all connected by the circle of life. Opening as harbingers of death co-exist with signs of spring, the story focuses on a girl and her grandparents as they “lie in the creaking and sighing of the two old pine trees above. They lie in the pine needle smell. They lie with grandmother and granddaddy holding hands. They lie with granddaddy talking farm talk up through the straw of his hat.” Flies symbolically advance time, landing on pictures of the newborn, the baptized, the married, the gone to war--until the girl finds herself sitting next to her dying grandfather, who tells her how one day they will all “walk together once more, as if after chores . . . to where grandmother and all her others wait for her, to where she hears the welcoming drone of her dead.”

Some of Christopher’s stories, profiling disconnected rather than interconnected people, are mostly technical exercises, with shocking turns of plot but little empathy. When Christopher combines his formidable technique with genuine concern, on the other hand, the effect is magical. “I Don’t Care If I Ever Get Back,” for instance, is a powerful depiction of a little boy’s consciousness as he heads outside into “the rest of the world.” He takes his father’s hand, and “the some small of me that is not him is given to him . . . . My father is the rope keeping me from falling into the open darkness under us . . . My father’s bigness of arm hugs me into the darkness that is the father smell that is mama’s wash and him. My father hugs me safe in the sound of the world that is my father’s heart.”