Collected Stories.

Grace Paley tells us in the introduction to this short-story collection that she grew up reading and writing poetry, but somewhere in the mid-1950s she found that the form no longer suited her. A Simple switch to straightforward prose did not provide the solution. The stories she wanted to tell--needed to tell--about men and women required some further invention. So Paley (although she does not tell us this) discovered her true voice, the voice of a poet, and fleshed out her poems into full-bodied scenes.

Full-bodied is perhaps the operative word here, because while Paley's stories often read more like poems or even one-act plays, they are distinctly composed of flesh and blood.

The most vital of her characters, the one who keeps raising her voice again and again, is a woman named Faith. I think of her as Paley's voice, if not necessarily the embodiment of her actual experience. Never, perhaps, has a writer's alter ego been so aptly named.

"I myself, although I lost God a long time ago, have never lost faith," she says in one of "Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life," the one that begins cryptically, "There were two husbands disappointed by eggs," but tells us all we need to know about the man who made two sons and the man who raised them. How they wound up together in Faith's kitchen one day is not nearly as important as how they leave it. "Goodbye, I said, have a nice day. Goodbye, they said once more, and set off in pride on paths which are not my concern."

Faith doesn't preach.

Because Faith is absent from many of the stories, we don't have the opportunity to tire of her. In any event, she is never tiresome, even when her children wear her out. An early story, when Faith's boys are young and she cannot detach one of them from her long enough to think, ends soaringly with her cradling the boy in her arms. "Then through the short fat fingers of my son, interred forever, like a black-and-white-barred king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes."

A later story, "The Long-Distance Runner," begins with indifferent sons, old enough for parting from their mother, an indifferent boyfriend, and Faith's run for life through the streets of New York into the neighborhood of her own childhood. There she becomes a quasi-prisoner in what was once her home, where Russian-Yiddish accents have been replaced by black voices putting her in her place, and where she is both trapped and enthralled by fear, discovery, and longing.

Paley's stories are best described as revelations. The publication of these forty-five stories of faith, resilience, and charity will no doubt entice more readers to discover what has for years delighted Paley fans, but the uninitiated should be fore-warned-especially if they aren't poetry lovers--that this is not a volume to devour quickly.

As a newcomer to her work, I was frequently stopped in my tracks by a perfect phrase or image. The down side is that you can easily get so caught up in the language that you lose your grip on the story line. Great poetry (and these stories are great poetry) arrests us that way, which is why poems are typically brief. Paley's careful, intricate craftsmanship is brilliant in small doses but can get a little contrived and muddled in some of her longer stories. It may be necessary for complete comprehension to read them over and over again, but poetry was always meant to be lingered over. Paley does not move the reader along with a great narrative swell, yet when she's humming it's amazing how much vitality she can squeeze into a character in such a small space, and how she makes us care so deeply about people we barely know.

Take the very short story "Samuel," about a boy who wasn't afraid of anything, who hopped a ride on the platform between locked subway cars and fell to his death when a man "whose boyhood had been more watchful than brave" became angry and pulled the emergency cord. Paley reveals the tragedy of this death in the most unexpected way, by holding out hope, and then withdrawing it. The hope rests with Samuel's mother, a young woman who quickly becomes pregnant again.

"The child born to her was a boy. They brought him to be seen and nursed. She smiled. But immediately she saw that this baby wasn't Samuel. She and her husband together have had other children, but never again will a boy exactly like Samuel be known."

Such simple eloquence is Paley at her best.

Although many of Paley's stories are what the theater calls kitchen dramas, the author (who is well-known for her social and political activism) has the brashness and confidence to reach far out into the world. Sometimes, it's only a short reach out the window to remind an angry young father walking by with his daughter about the precarious position of the human race, as she does in "Anxiety." Here Paley may be describing her essential self:

I move the pots of marigolds aside.

Then I'm able to lean on my elbow

way out into unshadowed visibility.

Once, not too long ago, the tenements

were speckled with women

like me in every third window up

to the fifth story, calling the children

from play to receive orders and instruction.

This memory enables me

to say strictly, Young man, I am an

older person who feels free because

of that to ask questions and give advice.

Other times, as in "Somewhere Else," Paley chronicles a long reach such as the one she made when she traveled with an American delegation to the People's Republic of China.

Although Paley's voice is a little heavier with experience in the later stories, it never loses the boldness of Shirley, the little Jewish girl in the early story, "The Loudest Voice," who disturbs the peace at home when she lands a starring role in the neighborhood Christmas pageant. The night after the big day, Shirley goes to sleep with a clear conscience after shushing the voices of her proud parents in the next room. "I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest," Paley writes.

There is no self-congratulation in those words, only the self-assurance that has kept Paley's voice so true throughout the years.