DISCOVERIES

WINTER HOURS: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems; By Mary Oliver; (Houghton Mifflin: 110 pp., $22)

Like Wendell Berry (who also writes poems filled with observations of the natural world and prose about sustainable living and community), Mary Oliver lives with such a profound sense of responsibility--”to live thoughtfully and intelligently”--that it makes a reader wonder how her poems manage to get off the ground and soar with such lightheartedness. It’s the precision, of course, of her observations and her vision. It’s the clarity that always makes things look light and easy. Ideally, in the company of good art we can forget how assiduously humans must strive for that clarity.

On the subject of writing poetry, Oliver is the most enlightened and enlightening author I have read, inspiring and chastening all at once: “I want every poem to ‘rest’ in intensity, I want it to be rich with ‘pictures of the world.’ . . . I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.” One is left with a breath of mystery. We could write poems, we could be struck by them suddenly or we could crawl through the undergrowth and lie in wait for them. Oliver describes an imaginative moment in Maine when “five white birch trees became five white ponies”: “This is called: happiness. This is called: stay away from me with your inches, and your savings accounts, and your plums in a jar. Your definitive anything. And if life is so various, so shifting, what could we possibly say of death, that black leaf, that it has in it any believable finality?”

NIGHT GARDENING; By E.L. Swann; (Hyperion: 216 pp., $16.95)

Here’s a weeper, a great romance of a novel created with every nameless intention of shamelessly pulling your heartstrings. On their own, the characters in “Night Gardening” are a bit thin, a bit suburban, a bit bourgeois. But their lives collide with a gorgeous momentum--the plot lays down strong enough tracks--and the setting is irresistible, the secret garden of our childhood imaginations.

Tristan is an elderly landscape architect hired to renovate a private garden outside Boston. Through the garden wall he sees Maggie, in her 60s and in a wheelchair recovering from a heart attack. Her husband (dutiful but boring and alcoholic) has died, her children (also alcoholics) are grown and her beloved garden has gone wild. Tristan takes an interest in Maggie and her garden, laying stone paths at night, eventually helping Maggie walk down them. Finally the two garden together through many nights until Maggie’s snobby children intervene. I suppose I’ve been had by these two elderly people talking about plants, swimming in ponds and kissing under trees. Maybe your resistance will be stronger. It is, for God’s sake, a romance novel.

SPIDERWEB; By Penelope Lively; (HarperCollins: 192 pp., $22)

Stella Brentwood, 65, an anthropologist, defiantly unmarried, buys a house in the west of England, not far from the home of her best friend’s husband (the friend has died). Of course, life in Kingston Florey has all the kinship linkages and tribal pathologies of the people she lived among in the Nile valley in Egypt and the Orkney Islands up north. As haphazard as the choices of her youth seemed at the time, Stella now sees fate working, and it is not comforting. This view of the world, that the seeds of the future exist in the present, held by the author or the narrator, helps determine the shape of a novel. Can anything in life be predicted? Does life move in jerks and spasms between pressure points, or does it flow--between generations? In a single life? In history? As Stella becomes the victim of neighborhood boys whose lives are studies in predictable misery, she thinks “of the aging process, [in which] you do not know where you are or who you are at all. . . . The reality has an eerie affinity with childhood, which is a continuous present. One moves obediently from day to day, but carrying this freight of references that send one flying in all directions.” These meditations on time and fate are more compelling than the fiction, which is little more than a stage with rather abrupt changes of scene.

THE LEPER’S COMPANIONS; By Julia Blackburn; (HarperCollins: 208 pp., $22)

Some writers are more playful with their roles as author than others. If a book were a universe, and I lived in it, I’m not sure which kind of God I’d want, organized and omniscient or playful Mighty Morph: reader, character, first person, within and without. Inhabiting the universe created by the latter God is trippy. It is not relaxing, but it can be a kind of virtual vacation. Julia Blackburn, author of “Daisy Bates in the Desert” often entangles herself in the worlds she creates. In “The Leper’s Companions,” a woman loses someone she loves. In her grief, she falls into another time and place, a village in the year 1410. She steps very gracefully between centuries, as though she were taking off a dress, or shedding skin. A leper comes to the village and leads the inhabitants on a pilgrimage. The grief-stricken patient (our narrator in her various guises) moves from a white hospital room to a village threatened by the plague and back again. “I was so empty I could have been blown across the land like a leaf. . . . The one thread that held me was the knowledge that I could always enter that other place in that other time. I was not made welcome there, but neither was I told to leave.” Now, you might lose patience with this, since there is nothing really to fall in love with, except the exercise of taking your imagination out for a spin and perhaps a tune-up.

CARTER CLAY; By Elizabeth Evans; (HarperCollins: 404 pp., $24)

Thrillers make life seem shorter than it really is. Your heart beats fast, everything collapses into good and evil, or a single act and the ensuing guilt, fear and possible redemption. Things get really ugly when carefully constructed lives turn suddenly, falling prey to accidents or intentions: comets and falling rocks or murderers. Carter Clay, Vietnam vet, alcoholic, driving one night with a drinking buddy, who, years before in less happy times, tried to kill him, hits a family on their way to visit grandma, killing the father, causing brain damage to the mother and crippling the teenage daughter. It’s hit and run but, full of guilt, Carter gets a job as an aide in the hospital where the mother is being treated. He continues to involve himself in the life of the mother and daughter but is pursued (more accurately haunted) by the twisted companion from the scene of the accident. Elizabeth Evans writes in a purposefully stuttering, confused style that effectively recreates Clay’s terrifying logic. Which is more frightening--the functioning madman who kills by accident or the cold-blooded killer? How people read these things on the beach, I’ll never know.