FISHING THE SLOE-BLACK RIVER. <i> By Colum McCann. (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company: 196 pp., $19.95).</i>

The young Irish writer Colum McCann comes at us from all sides in this collection of stories. As in his powerful debut novel, “Songdogs,” the settings of these 12 stories lies between Ireland and San Francisco, with a stop everywhere in between. The narrators are men and women, straight and gay, ranging in age from 20 to 80. They hold an array of pithy jobs at the low end of the scale: fish gutters, chicken sexers, handymen at homes for troubled youths, instructors in boxing. The stories, finally, are told in voices from logorrheic to curt, making full use of dialects and regionalisms, from quaint (to our ears) Irishisms to the flat monosyllables of the American West. This is a book where the words “dadgum” and “critters” coexist with “Cuchulainn” and “Diarmoid” and “Grainne.” In this collection, Ireland is a sad and sometimes violent world. In the lyrical final story, “Cathal’s Lake,” a farmer awakes to the news of a death: “The boy probably not old enough to shave. Maybe a head of hair on him like a wheatfield...A bottle of petrol in his hands and a rag from his mother’s kitchen lit in the top .... Then a plastic bullet slamming his chest.” Another casualty in Northern Ireland, the last horrible view of “the boy still alive in his house of burnt skin” standing as the final image of this land. Yet for all this harsh reality and for all the inevitability of sadness, “Fishing the Sloe-Black River” is not really a grim book. This, it seems to me, is a truly brilliant achievement, the delivery of hope against every odd. A spirit of sorts rises from the depths here, a spirit borne in the vigorous and inventive storytelling, in the lyrical language, in the affecting and richly drawn characters, and in the odd moments of satisfaction and succor that McCann does permit into these lives. As his narrator says in “A Word in Edgewise,” “Ah, it’s a sad world, but it gives you such funny stories.” I wouldn’t call anything in this collection “funny,” but in that woman’s assertion there is the promise of faith, upon which one can build toward redemption and salvation.