My Brother Running

McNair ( The Town of No ) writes with sympathy about the lives of small towns, collective and singular. In his fourth book, those lives include the ``dreamy-faced girl'' of ``The Secret,'' who spies her aunt, nude, alone in her bedroom, seeming to foreshadow the girl's own sexuality and a mysterious future. ``Francis Bound'' offers a sketch of the inner and outer ``old Francis,'' a stutterer, a trucker and a seeker, ``ransacking / the very air'' for ``the thought that is / already gone.'' And in ``Making Things Clean,'' one of the strongest poems, a high school shop teacher is shampooed by his elderly mother, engaging in ``the world's / old work of making things clean.'' Unlike some of his predecessors--Edgar Lee Masters comes to mind--McNair does not really anthologize the lives he glimpses, nor does he report on them; he just glimpses. That may be one reason why his work is moving: it is honest in its lyricism. McNair doesn't assume too much, but touches the human, and the contact is memorable. (Dec.)