THERE may be something a bit smug about the fellow who goes to Maine to spend his summers and then returns to the office full of intimate tales of Maine people, Maine lakes, coastlines, hills, skies, orchards, barns, and trees. We envy his close acquaintance and understanding of such things which are realities to him and only quaint oddities to us who travel in a subway instead of a buggy.

Mr. Coffin is one of these elect, and he not only has absorbed the feeling of countrified, sea-bitten Maine, but he has written poems about it that can carry his sensations to those unlucky wretches who have never seen its shores. In his second collection of Pine Tree verses, entitled "Maine Ballads," he treats almost solely Maine men and women--

"The lonely, patient ones, whose speech comes slow, Whose codles always lean towards the blow."

From the lyrical description of "Saltwater Farm," Coffin has turned to a portrayal of those Maine people who "still live by the skin of their teeth, on wind-pudding and small potatoes and few on a hill. They live by the weather and their wits. They come to sudden conclusions. They 'up and do things' that are for once and for all," as he describes them in his introduction. With the simplest of words and rhyme, Coffin attempts in this little volume to draw these folk, their acts, and lives that snuff out with a brief, "flourish of finality" pathetic in its inconspicuousness.

The reader unaware of the fundamentally simple weave of these people may feel that they are too often pathological cases, warped by a tough existence into a state of mind where they commit crazy, tragic actions--Mary Orr, for example, who just "upped" and deserted her husband after twenty years, or the Island wife who jumped into the sea one fine day. It is hard for us to regard these abrupt acts, that come with so little outward warning, as normal. We cannot understand the simplicity of a Thomas King who blows the head off his powerful body after carefully feeding his cows. We make our suicides spectacular.

It may be that the clean air, the snowy winters with bright skies, the flood of summer sunlight reflecting off the sea, the red barns and white cottages and dry-shingled wharf shacks wash and burn the Thomas Kings and Tom Baileys until they are scraped down to the "cord," leaving their inner texture bare for all to see. There is not that covering of subtlety and finesse which enables people to deceive one another, to appear insincere, to hide true thoughts. But the character of these simple people is so often invisible to us because of this very lack of surface adornment. One looks for a veneer where there is none, and is mystified.

The most moving of Coffin's verses deals with an old rural custom of marking children's heights upon the wall, a custom which he fashions into an appealing metaphor called "The Family Stairs." He draws heavily upon the emotion conveyed by understatement for an effect of quiet charm. Again in "The Race" and "When Worthen Plays," there is the same moving simplicity and clarity in catching a parallel of life in a human custom or act. As Percy Hutchison phrased it, although he deals with beauty and delicacy of subject, Coffin "never forgets that his is the oaten flute and not the lyre."

". . . When Worthen plays, men know why Spring

Comes white again, why robins sing

Where fire comes from, dew, and rain

Why women love and men folks yearn

and how the first star came to burn." J.P.L.