Bell 8

This debut collection by Lyon (who received the ``Discovery'' / The Nation Award in 1989) is a small but richly textured work. Taking its title from a sailor's term meaning ``home from the sea,'' much of the book reverberates with a briny New England sensibility--that of faded communities whose commerce had once thrived around rivers and harbors. Lyon, who has operated a ferry boat on the Connecticut River since 1986, observes these places with a sensitive, unsentimental eye, capturing a culture as it washes out to sea under the tide of gentrification. He conveys the sounds of barges, and questions the destructiveness of progress with a cool indifference (``It's hard to hate the bulldozer''), but ironically is at his best when he does not seem to be trying at all, when his characters divulge their shortcomings, mishaps and fumbling desires with a naive directness. As C. K. Williams observes of the characters in his foreword, ``They live their sadnesses and ordinary joys intensely, with no self-consciousness.'' (June)