CHANGES AND DREAMS

A second collection (after The Medlar Tree—not reviewed) of 13 carefully crafted stories from Beagan, a Welsh poet and writer, offers gentle evocations of time and place but seems finally rather bland. Set mostly in Wales, the pieces here are contemporary in their concerns and struggles—divorced women, children stalked by a molester—but are also often suffused with a sense of an older time, a time when druids kept the sacred shrines, life was lived close to the land, and children spent their lives largely out of doors, exploring the countryside. Two of the more notable tales are ``Glut,'' in which a no-nonsense wife and mother, learning of her husband's infidelity with a wealthy neighbor (whose bumper plum crop the wife has frugally made into jam), must struggle to rebuild her domestic kingdom; and ``Snatches of Guilty Time,'' in which a woman recently widowed attends a creative-writing course on the island of Anglesey (``the last bastion of the druids'') and finds that her imaginative appreciation of the island's old powers to heal and evoke love allow her finally to accept her husband's death. Other notables concern a child's increasingly violent encounters with a molester (``Green Eggs and Larches''); the life of a divorced woman, ``old enough now not to want winter,'' who teaches literature in a small town, an activity she describes while ruefully recalling the past and anticipating her evening meeting with a new lover, a very correct middle-aged man who quotes Donne (``Women of a Certain Age''); and a young woman who discovers the truth about her dead father when she attends her mother's second wedding (``The Gingerbread House''). In the title story, a grandmother, seeing her first lover and childhood playmate again, recalls the past, her disastrous marriage, and fantasizes about what might have been. Tales of loss and desperation unfortunately too pallid to resonate fully.