SWIMMING IN THE SHALLOW END is narrative poetry at its best, a verse memoir that examines the archetypal American conflict between the desire to stay and the passion to go. Take any community; every street, in and out, is crowded with the dreams and frustrations of characters who seek their identities on the road or in their favorite diners. In an exchange of stories between the narrator who returns like the prodigal son and his wayfaring friend, the worlds of the Bronx and Paris and Hanoi are not far from Muncie, Indiana. Like William Carlos Williams" Rutherford, New Jersey, and B.H. Fairchild"s Liberal, Kansas, Philip Raisor"s Middletown is a neighborhood pool that never seems long or deep enough, but grows in memory and the imagination. "Raisor"s poems spring vividly from the country, with "enough farm philosophy / to clog a pig," and move out into the wider world with wisdom, humor, and a stubborn resistance to despair. They look through the world"s pain and confusion toward...