DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES By Eugene McCabe Bloomsbury: 230 pp., $23.95

I cannot be the only reader who, reading the rich, rolling, wild language of the Scottish and Irish, feels that she has a head like a lottery cage, full of wooden balls with letters on them, cheeks stuffed chipmunk-like with unfamiliar words but no time (and probably no place) to look them up. The words rush along too quickly to step out of the flow. You might well lose your place. As with a visit to England, their books leave us with strange accents. Their words convey the melancholy weight of a bloody history; issues of birthright and inheritance and land and cows and progress fill Eugene McCabe’s novel “Death and Nightingales.” Beth’s mother married when she was three months pregnant with Beth (by another man). The man she married was angry and violent. Beth’s mother died from the kick of a prize bull, leaving “the poor wee morsel” at the mercy of a man who raised her as his servant.

Beth would not inherit. Her stepfather’s gold was locked in the cellar. It would be so easy to poison him. She falls in love with a handsome liar named Liam Ward. He makes the plan. But she finds that he plans to double-cross her when a deaf man reports that he has seen Liam digging Beth’s grave. Then all is fury and revenge with Parnell in the background inciting cynicism and hope, for a future without bawling cows and raping fathers and young people desperate to escape the thicket of authority and shame that has been woven around them.

*

THE MELANCHOLY OF ANATOMY

Stories

By Shelley Jackson

Anchor Books: 180 pp., $12 paper

I’ve been waiting for the next Rikki Ducornet, and here she comes, whistling around the corner as if writing stories was just a question of stringing words together on a good thick thread. But where Ducornet has an ornate, Byzantine, highfalutin, sometimes medieval shimmer to her prose, Shelley Jackson is mistress of bawd; more cockney, more Chaucer, more gobbledygook. These stories, for example, are built around the humors: choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguinary. They are called “Egg,” “Sperm,” “Cancer,” “Nerve,” “Blood,” “Milk” and “Fat,” to name a few. The egg grows and grows till it takes over the house of the woman who let it slip out; George works at a nerve supply company; a girl befriends a hair, who brings friends; an ugly girl gets all the love she needs because she can control her phlegm. Do not look for metaphor. It will kill you. Just read the words and make the pictures in your mind that Jackson is trying to paint.

Sure, it’s a subversive book: Every form of authoritarian language, from medical reports to legal jargon, is ridiculed and scrambled in these stories. “Sleep is falling. The crumbs run in drifts down the street, collect in the gutters. Sleep falls every day at noon here, with soothing regularity. Sometimes it melts on the way down, and falls as golden rain, or in cold weather, as golden sleet, but mostly our siesta is warm and dry. The occasional sleepstorm is cozy and harmless: a war waged with croutons and dinner rolls.”

*

SWIMMING AT SUPPERTIME

Seasons of Delight on the Wrong Side of Buzzards Bay

By Carol Wasserman

Crown: 186 pp., $22

Here is old-fashioned modern poverty, New England style. Carol Wasserman lives year-round in one of those communities on the East Coast that is flooded with tourists and renters and summer people in July and August. The caricature traditionally drawn is of picturesque but cranky townspeople who cannot wait for the season to end and to stay triumphantly while everyone else trudges back to work and wealth.

Wasserman’s essays in “Swimming at Suppertime” have a bit of that, the “swamp Yankees,” but it slowly dawns that she is really and truly poor: dump-picking, food-stamping, will-they-take-my-house-away poor. She is also elderly, and she lives alone. Not for a comma does she indulge in self-pity: “There have been perhaps four hundred thousand human generations. And only four or five in which a woman like yourself could survive alone. Could expect to be left undisturbed, in silence and solitude, to sleep without fear in her dark house, waiting for dawn and a decent electrician.”

The great love of her life, whom she had only seven years with, has died, and she dares not leave the house, or the town in which she grew up, in case he should come back looking for her. She gets work in a greenhouse or other places. She marvels at white peaches and the angel who lives in the ATM machine when she receives the first card of her life. “I have heard it said,” she writes, “that there is no shame in being poor but that it is damned inconvenient.”