Jennifer Senft, an editor and English and writing instructor, is offering two workshops in April — the Art of Fiction, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, and one on nature writing at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridge­hampton.

In the first, the fiction will be inspired by the art that’s in the Parrish, from the museum’s permanent collection to “Parrish Perspectives,” the current show of work by Jules Feiffer, Robert Dash, and Joe Zucker. Explored, Ms. Senft wrote, will be “fiction that you imagine within a piece of art, fiction in the style of the art, or fiction that replicates the medium.” Participants can write prose, drama, or poetry. The work of Oscar Wilde and Frank O’Hara will be among the readings.

The workshop, which costs $100 for museum members or $120 for nonmembers, will start on April 16 and continue on the following three Thursdays from 10 a.m. to noon.

At SoFo, genres including “personal nonfiction, journaling, poetry, fiction, and/or scientific inquiry” will be in play in a workshop devoted to writing about nature a la Annie Dillard, Peter Mat­thiessen, Richard Brautigan, and the poets Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. Examples of their work will be read and discussed, though the list was still being put together.

“This workshop will also be casual,” Ms. Senft wrote in an email. “We’ll walk outside in Vineyard Field (behind the museum) for prompts and cues. . . .” It will meet on three Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon, from April 25 to May 9. The fee is $60 for members, $85 for nonmembers.

Registration is through the two museums.

“Deep Lane”

Mark Doty

W.W. Norton, $25.95

Mark Doty’s “Deep Lane” is a book about country, symbolized by gardens and animals, frequently Mr. Doty’s dog, Ned, who accompanies him on long walks, but also birds, deer, goats, sea lions, a mammoth, a white fish, and ticks that enter his Eden. “Deep Lane” is about city in poems that take place on New York’s streets, in bars, gyms, hospitals, and barbershops.

In each of these environments, the poet’s appetite for life and awareness of loss and recovery are omnipresent, particularly when human beings make entrances: the poet’s ex, his present love, his mother and father, painters like Robert Harms and Jackson Pollock, and poets, among them Alan Dugan and Robinson Jeffers.

Poetry, a leitmotif throughout the book, beautifully captures Mr. Doty’s deep connection to his identity as a poet. He shows us, with a touch of irony, Alan Dugan, the “recalcitrant old boho,” and with precise description, Robinson Jeffers, a poet who “who could not be wholeheartedly pleased / with anything human.” His awareness of the art of poetry extends his humanity, as in the poem “ARS POETICA 14th St. Gym,” in which the title equates the precepts of poetry with “beauty that does not disguise the wound” when a one-armed man lifts himself on a pull-up machine.

Another major human connection, of children with their parents, was painful for Mr. Doty. He reveals this honestly as they speak to him from the underworld in poems that evoke their hurtful relationship with him. In “Apparition,” as he trims forsythia at the kitchen sink, his father says, “Mark is making the house pretty.” We learn his father did not speak to him for the last five years of his life, but he concludes that though he has been addressed in the third person, “He did say my name,” and it wasn’t mockery.

His mother, gone for 30 years, similarly is given the benefit of the doubt when her voice in him says, “You’ve got to forgive me,” and for a moment they are at last “equally in love / with intoxication,” after which she says, “I never meant to harm you.” The understatement in these poems is masterful in conveying irony and hurt.

But pain caused by humans can be mitigated by the beauty of nature, as in “Verge,” a poem about blooming cherry trees on the highway in April, which turns into a love poem when the poet, after a party, walks with his soon-to-become lover to his motorcycle, “perhaps a pair / of — could it be — soon-to-flower trees?” Mr. Doty shows his appetite for beauty and for life most clearly in “Hungry Ghost,” where he learns from his teachers that “my desire was a thirst / for something beyond forms.” He wonders, “When I’m gone, will I stop wanting?” He concludes that wanting “is also a form of immortality.”

The poem that to me most fully and poignantly represents the theme of loss and recovery is “This Is Your Home Now,” an elegy in which he describes the closing of the barbershop on 18th Street where the Peruvian barbers for years have been comforting: “I was happy in any chair, though I liked best / the touch of the oldest, who’d rest his hand / against my neck in the thoughtless confident way.” When the shop closes and he feels at a loss, he finds a sign, WILLIE’S BARBERSHOP, down the street. Willie tells him, “This is your home now,” leading Mr. Doty to the recollection of “the men I have outlived” and for whom he still feels grief.

The barbershop metamorphoses into “the kingdom of the lost” as Mr. Doty adds up his present satisfactions, a man who loves him, their dogs, more years together. For those of us who have lost a sense of belonging, this poem strikes a universal nerve.

In other poems home represents life’s difficulties. An example is “Spent,” when the poet, locked out of his house several times as he tries to bring the hydrangeas he cut inside, has to climb through a window, reminding us, almost comically, of life’s unforeseen hazards. And yet, as he shows in the poem that follows, “Amagansett Cherry,” “the con­torted thrust” of the cherry tree, rather than an unbent branch, is what gives it fervor.

Eight of the poems in “Deep Lane” are titled “Deep Lane,” the site of the poet’s Eden with its “crooked house” that exemplifies his human Garden of Eden. This shingled house symbolizes a oneness with nature. This is where the poet picks radishes, walks through paths in a cemetery, pulls up wild mustard.

The city, on the other hand, is a place of more human experience, as exemplified in “Underworld,” “the boy in outpatient . . . has failed to kill himself,” and in a needle-drug addict in “Crystal.”

“Deep Lane” sometimes seems more emotionally invested in the plant and animal world than in the human, most fully in “The King of Fire Island,” where “a buck in velvet at the garden rim” observing the men in “tea-dance light” makes the men “objects of his regal, / mild regard,” rather than he, theirs. The deer becomes “monarch of holly” and “hobbling prince of shadblow grove,” while “the men swayed and danced.”

When a deer’s head is found floating in the bay, the poem resolves its narrative by the poet asking to be guided out of the story and concludes the deer “must have been weary of that form, / as I grow weary of my head.”

What is so compelling in this long narrative is how the buck ultimately takes over the poem, and the island’s men who “stand with cocktails” recede as mere mortals.

Mr. Doty’s projection of himself as one with the deer epitomizes his constant identification with animals and plants, both an escape and a recognition of the mortality of humans. “Deep Lane” is a book of such moments; a paean to the fertility and the tragedy of human, animal, and vegetable life. It is sensitively and subtly written, and deeply satisfying, as the power of love with a found mate merges with the beauty of the natural world.

Carole Stone’s most recent book is “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems.” A professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, she lives part time in Springs.

Mark Doty of Springs won a National Book Award for “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.” He teaches at Rutgers University.

Return of the Poetry Affair

National Poetry Month is upon us, and to mark it Rosalind Brenner, a Springs artist, has again organized a Poetry Affair at LTV Studios in Wainscott. This year’s brings 14 Long Island poets to read from their work starting at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 10.

Among those reading with Ms. Brenner, a poet in her own right, will be Carole Stone, The Star’s book reviewer this week, whose collections include “American Rhapsody,” from CavanKerry Press. This year’s Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year, Graham Everett, who is the founding editor of Street Press, and last year’s, Annabelle Moseley, a Pushcart Prize nominee several times over, will read, as will George Wallace, a past Suffolk County poet laureate.

“They will be short readings of approximately five minutes each,” Ms. Brenner said. “We want to give you a quick taste and leave you asking for more.” A reception will start at 6:30, and books will be available for purchase. Admission is $5 or a donation of food to the East Hampton Food Pantry.

Workshops in Verse and Prose

Beginning on April 16 and running for two consecutive Thursdays at 7 p.m., Marc Perrin will lead a poetry workshop at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. Mr. Perrin, an instructor in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook University and the author of two collections of poems, will explore “poetic genres, markets, inspiration, and process,” a release said. The course is limited to 12 participants and costs $20. Registration in advance is required.

At the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, it’s time for another round of memoir writing classes with Eileen Obser, East Hamptoner and veteran writing coach. Starting on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., “personal and autobiographical writing” will be examined, involving readings, exercises, and group discussions. “Research techniques . . . and marketing information are included.” All levels of ability will be welcomed. The cost is $65 for five two-hour sessions.

“Spooky Action

at a Distance”

Howard Levy

CavanKerry Press, $16

Do the laws that govern the physical universe also govern human behavior? “Spooky Action at a Distance,” the title of Howard Levy’s new book of poems, was Einstein’s retort to physicists explaining quantum mechanics. In “The Age of Entanglement,” Louisa Gilder explains that Einstein scoffed at the idea that “Two particles that had once interacted could no matter how far apart remain entangled.” Think of identical twins claiming to feel each other’s pain even continents apart.

Or think, as Howard Levy apparently does, about lovers; his title poem, for example, employs quantum mechanics as a powerful metaphysical conceit for love, for the energy that binds two people together. Elsewhere in this collection, however, Mr. Levy decidedly sides with Einstein, who couldn’t fathom that particles were not independent, incapable of acting separately.

Many of Mr. Levy’s speakers feel alienated from the natural world. In these poems, whatever force holds people in love together has disappeared, and Mr. Levy’s speakers try, more often than not unsuccessfully, to feel conjoined to the world through which they move. Readers of “Spooky Action at a Distance” will need to decide if Mr. Levy believes people are subject to the same laws that hold the universe together or if we move independently through the world, striving to feel connected.

In the title poem, the speaker sets readers up for this comparison of love as entanglement (in the quantum mechanics sense) with the first lines:

It is this way: men and women

spin. Hundreds of miles apart, thousands

of miles, the speed of light, it will make no difference.

Mr. Levy establishes lovers as particles, neither of which remains unaffected by action taken toward each other. The speaker details what two people are doing simultaneously “across a continent.” A woman puts on a man’s shirt, and the man is able to see this happen with his imagination. Mr. Levy’s speaker tells us that “Such is the quanta of intimacy,” convincingly establishing this lovely trope of human being as particle that is further explored in the following stanzas.

But Mr. Levy’s poems move the other way, too. His speakers, when not musing on love, appear cut off from the world they inhabit, aware of the disconnect consciousness creates between external nature and mind. In “Why I Get Up Early,” for instance, the speaker walks the beach, taking in the beauty of sunrise and two deer atop a dune:

They watch me as I walk,

their attention has fixed me

into this scene. Here. Now

including me.

I have had such difficulty

ever feeling that.

This speaker admits his psychic distance from the natural world and the difficulties of living in the moment. The poem’s last two emotive lines, quoted above, explode with the force and surprise of something James Wright or Robert Bly might have written.

Other poems of disentanglement in this collection include “Indian Wells, December,” “#9, Again,” “He Wakes Up at Three A.M.,” and “Not Feeling.” All of these poems concern themselves with a sensation of not belonging, of restlessness, of inarticulateness in the face of nature. Mr. Levy’s speakers are Adams, cast out from the garden, unable to return to Eden and to make sense as to why they feel so disenfranchised. Here are the final two stanzas of “Not Feeling”:

Not feeling a single thing about light or splendor,

no extolling of God’s work

and no extolling randomness,

not at all amazed that accident

could arrive at this

but seizing on how emptiness

shapes itself into a roof

and how I remain fixed in shadow

even here

even here in this blazing place.

It’s clear that this speaker, confronted by God’s handiwork, finds himself incapable of praise. We’ve come a long way from the interconnected lovers as particles and arrived at a speaker experiencing a keen sense of isolation, unaffected by nature’s beauty.

This alternation between two meta­phorical takes on quantum mechanics creates the tension in this collection. Mr. Levy is at his best in short poems where he stretches his sentences over many lines, frequently enjambed, creating a rhythmical intensity propelling his poems down the page, as in “Prostate Cancer” and “Divorce: The Improvisation.”

But Mr. Levy exhibits a bit of trouble handling some of his longer poems. In these poems, such as “Questions for Baron” or “Indian Wells Diptych,” he appears to be trying too hard to convince his readers of the validity of his perceptions. For instance, in “Questions for Baron,” he writes:

I remember reading

that the OED says the word “lonely”

first appears in Shakespeare, Coriolanus.

How could that be possible?

Can you imagine this a modern, evolved condition,

an adaptation that enhances the possibility

of survival? I don’t know how

but, if so, what a horrible thought.

Aside from the fact that this passage seems like flat prose broken into lines that resemble poetry, readers may resent the speaker telling them how to feel about the subject matter. This happens perhaps a bit too often in this collection; Mr. Levy’s poems might be even more effective were he better able to preserve their sense of the inexplicable.

Finally, it appears that Mr. Levy too often lapses into use of the pathetic fallacy or strains too hard to create certain effects. “Indian Wells Diptych” features both of these miscues. Examine, for example, these lines:

The sky is all blue signature but the moon

hangs visible, very pale, as if used up,

exhausted, shaken

from the exertion of last night’s shining.

Besides the fact that it is impossible for the moon to be “used up,” note the way Mr. Levy tries to make sure we don’t miss this — he employs “used up,” follows it with “exhausted,” and piles it on with yet another line that means the same thing, “shaken / from the exertion of last night’s shining.” Does the moon exert itself?

Later, near the end of the same poem, Mr. Levy writes of the ducks his speaker is observing that “they can wonder, in their fine duck way.” I’m uncertain it’s a poetic virtue to posit an understanding of the manner in which ducks “wonder,” and if, in fact, that manner is “fine.”

In general, I found much to admire in this collection. Howard Levy writes with great sensitivity about human relationships using strong imagery and some wonderful metaphors. The fact that a few of these poems might have benefited from more careful editing does not diminish or detract from the overall efficacy of “Spooky Action at a Distance.” Perhaps Einstein would have enjoyed it; perhaps you will, too.

Dan Giancola is a professor of English at Suffolk Community College. His collections of poems include “Data Error” and “Part Mirth, Part Murder.”

Howard Levy’s work has appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and The Gettysburg Review. He lives part time in Springs.

“The Innovators”

Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, $35

The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.     — Muriel Rukeyser

“The Innovators” offers you a splendid journey through time and space via personalities, facts, and ideas. It is rich in stories, both personal and historical, easy-to-understand technical details at the intersection of the humanities and technology, and the importance of “human-machine symbiosis.” I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to know how we got to here and now, and how “it” came from “bit” — the striking idea that information sits at the heart of all reality, just as it sits at the core of a computer.

Walter Isaacson has set out to report on how innovations actually happen in the real world. How disruptive ideas became realities. Who made the dozens of breakthroughs that gave us the digital culture we inhabit (and many enjoy) today. How collaborations among peers and between generations emerge in creating the digital revolution. (But not universally — think solo innovators like Newton, Einstein, Godel.) What the ingredients of “creative leaps” are. And how cultural and social forces made possible the “climate of innovation” that led to our digital era. In this ambitious undertaking, he is (happily) very successful.

According to the celebrated physicist John Archibald Wheeler, “ ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has . . . an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of ‘yes-no’ questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.”

On the other hand, the poet Muriel Rukeyser believed that stories trump digits. Can they both be right?

This book illuminates the human stories that drive the technology and science developed by many well-known characters — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing, IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer — and dozens of unsung heroes, such as Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-52), a brilliant eccentric. And thereby hangs a beguiling tale, one of many Mr. Isaacson tells.

Ada was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, the famous (and infamous) Romantic poet who was “seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous.” Ada inherited her “poetic and insubordinate temperament” from her father and her interest in mathematics from her mother. (Think Rukeyser and Wheeler as a team.) This created a combination Ada called her love for “poetical science,” and she felt comfortable at the crossroads of the hard sciences and the soft humanities.

Mr. Isaacson comes back to this dual constellation of interests over and over again as he discusses the other heroes of the digital revolution, yet she is the most notable woman to play a starring role in this story of digital innovations.

Ada had inherited many of Lord Byron’s eccentricities and passions. While a teenager, she had a liaison with her tutor. She studied mathematics, was enamored of technology, and was impressed with an automatic weaving loom that used punched cards to instruct a single piece of equipment to create varied fabric patterns. These were precursors of IBM’s punch cards that told early mainframe computers what to do.

Ada befriended many talented think­ers of her era, such as Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine, a mechanical device that calculated trigonometric values and logarithms by breaking the process into “baby steps” that entailed only addition and subtraction. It could even solve differential equations. Babbage later developed the Analytical Engine, which could be “programmed” (as we would say today) and was a century ahead of its time.

In an essay on imagination, Ada wrote that Babbage had been able to do this using a trick employed by many great innovators: a facility for combining ideas from many different fields of activity. Again and again this quality appears to an extraordinary degree among the larger-than-life personalities whose vivid stories appear in Mr. Isaacson’s book, abetted by their ability to work together in teams focused on inspired collaborations.

To some, Lady Lovelace was a computer pioneer and a feminist icon. But she was ridiculed as delusional, gran­diose, and flighty by others. She appreciated, popularized, and even financed Babbage’s pioneering work. She figured out how to “program” a Difference Engine. Sadly, after becoming addicted to gambling and opiates, she died penniless at age 36 — the same age Lord Byron died — and was buried next to her father.

Alan Turing’s story (and that of his universal computer) has been well told in biographies and the cinema, but other major characters who appear are Vannevar Bush (who first described a personal computer), John von Neumann (who built an enormous modern computer at the Institute for Advanced Study), Stewart Brand (who developed the Whole Earth Catalog), Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux open-source software), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (creators of Google), and many others.

Before Google came along, computer geeks avoided anything in their field that might have been considered “touchy-feely” — their pejorative term for human responses to hardware and software, the humanities. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin changed all of that in 1998. Vannevar Bush had said in 1945 that knowledge was expanding at such an astonishing rate that it was virtually impossible to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, in their paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” showed how they could “map” billions of Web pages and rank a website according to how often people visited it or other Web pages cited or referred to it (called backlinks), which was roughly congruent to a billion-member crowd’s subjective idea of a website’s importance.

This vision culminated in such an intimate linkage between computers, networks, and humans that we can now search for — and promptly find information on — virtually any subject, from antiprotons to zebras. Searching Google these days begins to feel spooky, like having an infinite IQ . . . something I’ve always wanted!

“The Innovators” contains a valuable timeline that provides a synoptic overview of the innovators and their contributions to the digital revolution, and a brilliant summary of Mr. Isaacson’s theme that diverse teams made this one hell of a revolution.

Stephen Rosen, a physicist, lives in New York and East Hampton. His latest book is “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great! Dying to Come Back as a Memoir.”

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and the author of “Steve Jobs,” has spent summers on the South Fork for many years.

Lunch With Sheehy

Gail Sheehy’s recent autobiography, “Daring: My Passages,” explores her career in journalism at New York magazine in the go-go ’70s, her hugely popular 1976 book, “Passages,” and her relationship with Clay Felker, the influential editor. She will discuss all this and more as the guest of the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons at a lunch on Friday, April 24, from noon to 3 p.m. The setting is Cowfish, on the Shinnecock Canal in Hampton Bays, where three courses will be served and books will be available at a discounted price.

R.S.V.P.s are due by tomorrow by sending a $60 check — made out to LWV Hamptons — to Gladys Remler, the league’s co-chairwoman of special events, at 180 Melody Court, Eastport 11941. The number to call with questions is 288-9021.

Remembrance at Canio’s

To mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 16 and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, Sande Boritz Berger will visit Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor to read from her debut novel, “The Sweetness,” on Saturday at 5 p.m. The book, a semifinalist for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel award, involves two Jewish girls, cousins, one American and one Eastern European, and their differing experiences in wartime.

The author is a graduate of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature and lives in Bridgehampton.

“The Players”

Jill Bialosky

Knopf, $26

Jill Bialosky’s “The Players” captures the essence of Americana in her baseball poems, in her descriptions of the beach, nature, small-town life, motherhood, and parents. Her true subject is the inevitability of loss, which includes children growing up and leaving, the death of a parent.

The introductory poem, “The Lucky Ones,” involves the theme of the much loved son maturing, “ours, the boy of late youth, / of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole / and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming / of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager.” Nature and its dark underside is introduced through the image of a garter snake, “a comet of danger, serpent of the water” they watch as they sit on the beach.

The son’s maturation is followed up in the long poem “Manhood” that makes up the first section, held together by the masculine American pursuit of baseball. The poem’s point of view, ranging from the players, the mothers, the fathers, girls who were “played,” and the spectators, covers the gamut of the game, a stand-in for emerging male aggression and a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. The nuances of the game and the boys’ development are shown. Its ultimate reward when “your eye caught hers / and your body exploded into bliss.” Baseball is a symbol for the needs and concerns of all of these groups, all of whom are players even if they are not on the field.

Other American scenes are evoked through landscape, as in “American Comedy,” where “They are tearing up fields where horses graze / for designer mansions,” while the speaker misses “wildflowers, horse dung, and clover.” In these poems the dark side of American life emerges subtly as varied characters who inhabit Ms. Bialosky’s milieu are presented. In “Sonnet for the Misbegotten” there are surfers “in black diving penguin suits,” anorexics “speed-walking the beach,” and a scene at a barbecue. What could be more American? The two ironic titles quietly convey Ms. Bialosky’s critique of the dramatis personae as well as their vulnerability. In “American Pastoral,” for example, “One of us joined a support group / or is leaving the marriage.”

Having wondered many times who owns the flip-flops and shoes left by beachgoers I have to say my favorite poem in this section was “Ode.” I love the way Ms. Bialosky places this seemingly humorous poem in a literary context, tradition being the first hint the poem has a deeper meaning. She goes directly to her omnipresent theme, loss. “Somebody stole my yellow flip-flops.” She speculates, “I guess they needed them more than me,” and tells us, “I bought them / at Kmart for ten ninety-nine.” Her overreaction to this theft — “It makes / me sad. The lack of humanity. The / guts. The betrayal” — is intentionally laughable. Yet underneath the comic surface lies the outrage at losses, large and small.

And the larger losses appear in poems in the section called “The Players,” having to do with what happens after a loved one dies when there is the packing up of documents and household possessions: birth and death certificates, the divorce decree, scrapbooks with corsages and ballet programs. “The Guardians,” an apt title for the poem, suggests that those who were once guarded by the dead are now their guardians.

I was particularly drawn to “April Mornings,” a takeoff on Robert Hayden’s “Sunday Mornings,” one of my all-time favorite poems. In Ms. Bialosky’s version it is the mother, rather than the father, who gets up. However, instead of a caring parent, we read of “the dull and sad / pennies of her eyes, / body limp as a fevered / child’s” and “the awful creak / of the iron mail chute” opening before “the knife slit open / the envelopes / of debts unpaid.”

There are many enjoyable poems in this book, with descriptions of creatures such as sand crabs, gulls, and sandpipers, as well as the ocean, a solid tree, a bird’s nest.

She deftly merges the world of birds with the way marriage evolves from first tenderness in “Marriage Nests,” which has the two powerful last lines “I hear him get up, the sound of heavy footsteps. / Birds call. A cry deeper than hurt or love.”

The three poems about literature, in a section slyly titled “Interlude,” cite novels that educate us, such as “The House of Mirth” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” and describe a visit to Jane Austen’s haunts in Bath and the influence of “The Portrait of a Lady.” These poems serve as a counterpoint to the family life in the poems that surround them, a commentary on how reading also forms us.

Most poignant and true are poems about a son who has turned into an adolescent, especially “Perspective,” with its lovely lyrical refrain, “For two days it was cold and it rained.” Its conclusion has the mother remembering the family that was: “Look, that was once us / sailing down the small / sand hill to the beach / with you in our arms.”

The speaker’s inner thoughts, while she observes the ocean, the beach, the sea animals, reveal the essence of her feelings about the anguish of mothers who “must watch their children / thrive and suffer,” in short, life’s impermanence. Through close observation of her world, Ms. Bialosky conveys both the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of life.

Jill Bialosky’s books include “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life,” a memoir, and “Intruder,” a collection of poems. An editor at W.W. Norton, she lives in New York and Bridgehampton.

Carole Stone’s most recent poetry collections are “Hurt, the Shadow” and “American Rhapsody.” She lives part time in Springs.

“Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the

Small Presses”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $19.95

It is Pushcart Prize time again, and those who await the collection will do well to find a bookmark and a cozy spot. Pushcart editors have dipped into the independent and small magazines as a pool and come forth with a thick, healthy offering.

Looking into the fiction in “Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the Small Presses” is especially gratifying because a unity emerges in the writers’ attention to story. Well, they are short stories, true, so they tell stories in one way or another, but the best in this volume of bests attend to story as a concept, as a theme. In some selections it is explicitly front and center, and in others it waits in corners, in the midst of other subject matter and various backdrops: family, “Madame Bovary,” homelessness, driving, the World Wide Web, divine parentage or the question of it, music, suicide, football, rock climbing, the perspective of the loved one of a stripper, dogs.

I do have to make sure to mention the dogs. There are four stories in this collection in which a dog plays a major role as a metaphor. But not by any means the same metaphor, in case you worried Bill Henderson was slacking in his duties as Editor and Duke of this enterprise. He’s on top of it in this volume, as he has been for the 39-year duration of the series. Thank you for doing this, sir.

One of those dog stories, “Trim Palace” by Alexander Maksik, which was first published in Tin House, is among the finest pieces here. It is carefully and elegantly written, humor subtle, images concrete. In it, Peter, in his 30s, has lost his way in life and is working as a janitor at an airport. On the job, he runs into an old friend with whom he’s lost touch. The friend has a pretty wife, a sleek cellphone, important places to be. His question to Peter is, “I got to ask. Short version, okay, but, what the fuck happened?”

How does a person’s story become so? At what point is the story over with no possibility of a new direction? Peter accepts a house/dog-sitting job from the friend and finds himself taking care of an aged Great Dane, metaphor for fragility and power and the potent but vulnerable force of a life. There’s a tender quality here, an optimism; it is written with rare respect for human potential for regeneration. I read in the contributors’ notes that Mr. Maksik is the author of two novels. So I’ll be looking for those.

In this edition of the Pushcart Prize, story is treated variously as a fragile and complex human drive, a way to brilliantly organize human suffering, as a dot-connecter in an increasingly fragmented landscape of text, blurb, post, tweet. In light of the last, “The News Cycle” by Daniel Tovrov, which first appeared in ZYZZYVA, is an absurdist riff on reporting, reality, and responsibility in the age of the He or She With the Greatest Number of Hits Wins world of news on the Internet. Pacing-wise, the piece takes the shape of the news cycle, revving up, wheeling off, moving on.

It’s fair to say that the fiction in this volume — not every single story, but a critical mass and several of the essays as well — goes meta. A case in point is Maribeth Fischer’s essay “The Fiction Writer,” first published in The Yale Review, which deals with the pull and seductive danger of story in the psycho-emotional sense. Ms. Fischer’s piece is about storytelling in the hands of a pathological liar who inhabited her personal and professional life for a time. A self-avowed successful fiction writer, this person serves in the essay as the nugget around which Ms. Fischer’s ruminations on storytelling and the magnetism of belief swirl and roost. The piece somehow warms and chills at the very same time. Fascinating, and expertly executed.

When it comes to meta and stories, there’s the danger that the going can get clinical, fussy, arch, know-it-all. It can get terribly self-conscious, and one of the volume’s most effective stories examines this very pitfall. The main character of “Unmoving Like a Mighty River Stilled” by Alan Rossi, from The Missouri Review, takes up the case of a semiprofessional rock climber who is having major issues with one of his climbing partners and a piece of equipment called a “helmet cam,” the current tool of his climbing partner’s insistence that all of their adventures be captured on video, to be posted as brag and record and proof that the glory happened.

The story is sunk deeply into the narrative voice of the main character, detailing his discomfort and his self-consciousness in the many other postures of his life, which have somehow come together on the issue of the helmet cam, of representing an event rather than purely living it.

The writers represented in this year’s Pushcart volume share a commitment to the work at hand. As a reader, the experience of immersion is authentic, palpable. For example, and maybe back to the potential pitfalls of meta in fiction, these writers are not messing it up with gimmick or posture.

“By the Time You Read This” by Yannick Murphy, which originally appeared in Conjunctions, maybe verges on that but snatches itself back from the jaws of shtick with rare charm, unexpected innocence, and reality hilariously hosted by absurdity. Ms. Murphy’s story is told in epistolary past tense as a series of fragmented suicide notes to various recipients from an unnamed woman, who is the enraged wife of a cheating husband. The method of suicide shifts from fragment to fragment, and the note-writer’s rage is pure yet totally distracted by the minutae of life (e.g., the dog who needs her second dose of heartworm medicine) and her own frequent digressions. Ms. Murphy’s effort is clever, compact, and really, really funny.

The charm and pull, balm and elixir of story are well represented by these pieces. Pushcart once again makes a good showing of what’s out there, what the independent and small magazines are offering readers. It’s a volume full of work that intrigues, engages, gets you with a good story.

Evan Harris, the author of “The Art of Quitting,” lives in East Hampton.

Bill Henderson’s latest book is “Cathedral.” He lives in Springs.

“Art in America

1945-1970”

Edited by Jed Perl

The Library of America, $40

Fast-paced changes in the goals of American artists during the quarter-century following World War II were all passionately felt and widely debated, with many creative voices participating in the effort to define modernity.

Jed Perl’s broad, perceptive selection of material reflecting these voices in “Art in America 1945-1970” makes this hefty anthology an illuminating reference to its era. All the major shifts in sensibility are present, so it is fairly easy to pick up the many ways in which contemporaries were addressing the validity of Abstract Expressionism, then Pop, and then Minimalism.

To best capture the spirit of the dialogue, and to suggest what was in the air, Mr. Perl includes material from well-known and now lesser-known periodicals, and also from exhibition catalogs, books, lectures, letters, and artists’ statements. It is a special pleasure to find the carefully weighed language of poetry appearing here too, in the context of its inspiration. Examples include Howard Nemerov responding to an iron sculpture by David Smith and Frank O’Hara responding to a painting by Mike Goldberg.

As might be expected, chronology propels the anthology along. The pattern adjusts, however, to group together multiple selections by an individual author. This allows a fuller view of an often influential figure. Mr. Perl gives every writer a headnote, which is usually a succinct and pithy career assessment. These interpretive and welcome background over­views stem from Mr. Perl’s long career as a respected art critic and art historian. A considerable amount of the documentary research for this anthology seems to relate to his book “New Art City” (2005), a narrative celebrating New York’s history as a magnet for artists.

Mr. Perl is thorough in presenting the era’s intellectuals, who tend to bring in social circumstances or psychological issues as they address the creative process and analyze artistic content. Four essays offer insight into Clement Greenberg’s influence on taste. Another four provide a view of Harold Rosenberg’s important contributions, including “The American Action Paint­ers,” which points to the viewer’s engagement in the artist’s creative act, and “Mobile, Theatrical, Active,” published a dozen years later, which considers emerging developments.

The selections representing Meyer Schapiro’s probing critique — particularly “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art” — underscore his role as a champion of the human imagination and his timely fit into the 1945-1970 psyche. Here, too, is Leo Steinberg’s “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” which gave Harper’s readers a keener understanding of Jasper Johns and much else. Susan Sontag discusses materials, objects, and the treatment of time in her significant contribution, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition.” There is also piercing commentary on the social impact of the Museum of Modern Art in Dwight McDonald’s New Yorker profile of Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director.

The breadth and probing spirit animating the selections frequently reveal the way differing ideas launched, then developed further within the popular culture. In photography, for example, six writings, dating from 1946 to 1965, divide between either encouraging audience response to the subject depicted, or encouraging response to the design extracted from the original source. James Agee, in an introduction to Helen Levitt’s photography of children on the streets of New York, emphasizes her way of seeing and understanding a face or an emotion; Jack Kerouac’s essay for Robert Frank’s “The Americans” cites Frank’s way of finding “the everythingness of America,” and Truman Capote, writing about Richard Avedon, notes “the blood-coursing aliveness he could insert in so still an entity as a photograph.”

Among authors intent on emphasizing the invention of new art, there is Robert Creeley’s appreciation of the subtle forms in Harry Callahan’s photographs; Harold Rosenberg noting that he finds Aaron Siskind’s photography has “the dual picture planes, calligraphy, the post-Cubist balances, the free strokes and aerial perspectives, the accidental landscapes, galaxies hinted in stains, of half a dozen vanguard styles,” and Siskind himself writing that when he photographs an object, “it is often unrecognizable; for it has been removed from its usual context, disassociated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships.”

Artists’ statements, often originally published in conjunction with an exhibition, appear throughout as primary sources. It is easy to feel the passion and conviction. Some have great resonance, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s comment on trying to act in the gap between art and life, and Ad Reinhardt’s statement on purity, “No confusing painting with everything that is not painting.”

Other artists’ statements are especially treasured for the way in which they bring out sources of inspiration. Anni Albers, for example, wrote of the significance of pre-Columbian textiles, and Jackson Pollock’s reference to Indian sand painting is now legendary. So, too, is Willem de Kooning’s discussion of the old masters and their handling of pictorial space.

It is the carefully reasoned essays illuminating new directions that are likely to be frequently consulted. Barbara Rose’s “ABC Art” is highly prized for its treatment of Minimalism’s shift to a new sensibility and its rejection of the emotional content of Abstract Expressionism. Donald Judd’s “Specific Objects” also adds significantly to the material forming a core reference for Minimalism.

Authors of writings on Pop’s ascendancy frequently establish links between America’s growing materialism and the artists’ celebration of society’s icons. Michael Fried notes that “an art like Warhol’s is necessarily parasitic upon the myths of its time, and indirectly therefore upon the machinery of fame and publicity that markets those myths.” Gene Swenson is especially perceptive, too, in “The New American ‘Sign Painters,’ ” and in “Junk­dump Fair Surveyed” John Bernard Myers connects money, fashion, vanguard art, and the changing social scene in a way that also relates to the earlier days of the struggling Abstract Expressionists.

Anthologies can be a great convenience. Content here from numerous short-lived midcentury periodicals, including It Is, The Tiger’s Eye, Possibilities, trans/formation, and Black Mountain Review, is impressive, and of course extremely useful due to limited availability. For the most part, this content reflects not only the openness to change that prevailed at the end of World War II, but also the dialogue among members of the Abstract Expressionist generation. In an attempt to accurately capture what was in the air, Mr. Perl is careful to direct attention to all sides in this discourse. Bias becomes historical fact.

Criticism itself became a subject of study in the ’60s, as Mr. Perl reminds us in his introduction. “Art in America 1945-1970” is likely to be regarded as a thoughtful and useful product of this development. It highlights issues, and it demonstrates how insightful writings about the visual arts are contributions to the continuous sorting of America’s cultural history.

Phyllis Braff is an art critic, curator, and retired museum administrator who lives in East Hampton.

Montauk at the St. Patrick’s Day parade: It’s not all beer cups and bagpipes. How about the history of the place?

For those interested in such, Carl Fisher, the visionary prewar developer most responsible for the shape the “Miami Beach of the North” was to take, is the subject of a brick-thick biography by Jerry M. Fisher, his grandnephew. “The Pacesetter,” first published in 1998, is just out in a new edition from the Friesen Press, a self-publishing concern out west.

Born in middle-of-the-country obscurity in Greensburg, Ind., in 1874, Fisher was an entrepreneur from his teenage years, moving from brilliant marketing during the bicycle craze to making Prest-o-Lite automobile headlamps to earning “Mr. Miami Beach” status as a developer. He was a co-founder and president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500, hence the book’s title, and the builder of the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, yet partly as a result of declining to name these monumental projects after himself, Jerry Fisher points out in his preface, in 1938 “Who’s Who” didn’t know him from Adam.

Back to the hamlet at hand, in 1925 Fisher bought more than 9,000 acres from Arthur Benson for $2.5 million and two years later built perhaps his most lasting legacy there, the Montauk Manor. Two years after that, of course, came the Great Crash. By 1934 Fisher had declared personal bankruptcy “as the drinking and womanizing continued unabated,” Peter M. Wolf, who would go on to write “Land Use and Abuse in America,” wrote in a 1998 review in The Star. “When he died at Miami Beach in 1939, his estate was estimated at $52,198, far below his peak net worth, estimated 50 million in 1920 dollars. . . .”

A most American of stories.