Crossing Shattuck Bridge

Sanford's accomplished collection of 10 whimsical Southern stories permits the reader glimpses of darker themes--death, lost love, unrequited passion, the loss of memory--but rarely addresses them directly. In many of Sanford's (Lasting Attachments) lyrical tales, the backstory is more gripping than the main events. In the title story, two women drive carefully over a rickety old bridge on their way to an old baby-sitter's funeral; the precariousness of the crossing brings back childhood memories of the day both their mothers died after drinking well water at a picnic. In ""Bear the Dead Away,"" a woman's mourning of an old flame's death points up her own life's stagnation. The most successful and moving stories suggest the warmth of O'Henry and the precision of Raymond Carver. A freewheeling woman startles her stuffy, reclusive cousin with old family secrets on a surprise visit in ""Strangers and Pilgrims""; Esther has not seen Nola for 34 years, and what she learns from her about their respective parentage shakes all her firmly held beliefs. Some of the stories rely on the novelty of their characters' chemistry, as in ""Housekeeping,"" in which a handsome older man moves in on a lonely single woman by fixing up a house she rents out. Sanford has a poetic way with a sentence and she writes original, off-kilter dialogue; by turns witty and exceptionally wise, her characters are always impeccably imagined. Entertaining, civilized and delicately restrained, these tales are poignantly informed by the heart's instincts and the head's acuity. (Dec.)