GUIDELINES FOR MOUNTAIN LION SAFETY
By Poe Ballantine. Transit Lounge Publishing. $29.95.

Impetuously, the blurb garlands Poe Ballantine​ as one of the "finest living American writers". That's an overreach. I'd see him more as a keen observer and colourful essayist.

From his comparative haven of late marriage and fatherhood, Poe looks back with amused tolerance on his "indispensable lost years". A time when his attempted novels used to detonate "like joke-shop cigars".

Those earlier years wound a haphazard trail across America. These rambunctious essays, all originally published in The Sun magazine in the US, sum up the wandering writer's life.

The author's jaunty essay technique often sets several hares running. Salida is one piece that rounds them up nicely. The youthful Poe does tough training as a hospital assistant. Despite this hardening up, he hurts from his beloved grandpa's early death. As if modelling his life on a Merle Haggard song, he resolves to hit the road and "never look back".

Poe recalls the women of his coast-to-coast travel fever. Some he beds. Others scorn him. Why would a smart young woman fall for the "37-year-old janitor" that he once was? Some women he treats gallantly or gives a wide berth.

The most uncomfortable essay is for doomed Dolores. She's born of a fractured family with no future. Poe eternally regrets taking advantage of her. Even this piece is marked by gritty and self-mocking humour.

In Poe's America, you might see a cat stranded on a couch in an Arkansas flood. You might share banana bread with a disabled Vermont woman, or use up the frozen elk from an old geezer's freezer. As Poe's sometime Austrian acquaintance Hilde complains, the real America is "not like in the pictures".

If you relate to the distinctive culture of that real America, try these essays. During a close encounter in California last year, Poe's first mountain lion guideline worked for me. "Don't approach it," this recommends. "Never turn and run."

Stephen Saunders is a Canberra reviewer.