Writers who fall in love with a landscape risk purple prose. The silence of any landscape mocks the wonderful rush of vocabulary, scientific and metaphoric, that floods the writer’s imagination.

“When we came into this country, runaways, renegades, we were like birds that had to sing,” writes Rick Bass, a celebrated stylist and sometime activist. Mr. Bass’s new collection, “The Lives of Rocks” (Houghton Mifflin, 211 pages, $23), suggests that the writer’s compulsion to write, or “sing,” has as much to do with psychology as it does with landscape. Mr. Bass dramatizes the temptations of purple prose.

He turns the pathetic fallacy on its head, and instead of projecting his feelings onto the view, he invents characters who try to use the view to interpret their own feelings. Mr. Bass makes sure that the task is never easy.

In “Pagans,” Mr. Bass puts a teenage love triangle in the context of a strange terrain: the mouth of the polluted Sabine River, on the gulf coast, in a neighborhood of refineries that burn all night. Two senior boys spend their skip days playing with an old abandoned crane, dipping a diving bell into the river and assembling a midstream island out of nearby wreckage. Pretty soon, a girl from the junior class, Annie, starts tagging along, and the boy’s roguish fooling turns innocent, magical, and then gets uncomfortably loaded:

Sometimes they would be too restless to fool with even the magnificence of the crane. Bored with the familiar, the three of them would walk down the abandoned railroad tracks, gathering plump late-season dewberries, blackening their hands with the juice until they looked as if they had been working with oil. Kirby or Richard would take off his shirt and make a sling out of it in which to gather the berries.

Though the berries seem like an easy symbol, especially when they stain the hands, Mr. Bass goes farther, comparing the stain to oil. The comparison does not besmirch the teenagers: It mimics their own mental habit, of kidding themselves with pseudo-work and prankish science.

When Kirby initiates physical contact with Annie, the boys, now more competitive then ever, “sank a bit deeper into the fields of love, like twin pistons dropping a little deeper, leaving Richard off-balance for a moment, for a day, poised above, distanced now.” Mr. Bass picks up oil field imagery in order to drop down right away into murky psychological depths.

After Annie has seen enough of the boys’ bodies, she begins to dream of them, and of “ghost ships, and underworld rides.” In a pleasant literalism, she associates her subconscious with her trips in the diving bell, which the crane hoists and then drags through the poisonous Sabine River. This dream world, however, is wholly answerable to the claims of naturalism. Annie abandons the boys’ fascination with Satanic mills, and seizes on the berries as her salvation:

The berries they brought home were sweet and delicious, ripe and plump. The dreams of gas-flares and simmering underworld fires, only images, possessed nothing of the berries’ reality. Only one world, she told herself. There is nothing to be frightened of, no need to be cautious about anything.

Mr. Bass puts the landscape before Annie and lets her read it, with her own faulty confidence. A true fiction writer, Mr. Bass saves himself from poeticizing.

Blighted landscapes like the Sabine bring out the best in Mr. Bass, a committed conservationist who also recognizes that humans will be humans. In “Titan,” a tale of a Mobile Bay Jubilee, he writes that an innocent enjoyment of bounty belongs to any good childhood. In “Pagans,” he celebrates even the dirty Sabine as a kind of endangered space:

Soft seams of possibility, places where no boundaries had been claimed — places where reservoirs of infinite potential lay exposed and waiting for the claimant, the discoverer, the laborer, the imaginer. Places of richness and health, even in the midst of heart-rotting, gut-eating poisons.

Mr. Bass’s tendency to recognize beauty even in the kind of despoliation he hates reflects another, more common elegiac observation, about people. In Mr. Bass’s stories, which feature very little dialogue, characters repeatedly yearn for togetherness. A young boy longs for the “traditional or mythical unity” of his family. In another story, “The Canoeists,” Mr. Bass considers chance encounters between hitchhiking adventurers and truck drivers: “what invisible braid or fabric is formed of such connections [. . .] Do they last, invisible, to form a kind of fiber or residue in the world, or are they all eventually washed away, as if cleansed and made nothing again by a summer rainstorm’s passage?”

Beneath Mr. Bass’s rigorous concern for beloved landscapes lies an appreciation for cycles and a doubtfulness about permanence.

In “Fiber,” a barely fictional confession, Mr. Bass complains that storytelling “has gotten so weak and safe.” That may be true, but the stories in “The Lives of Rocks” are valuable more for the complexity of Mr. Bass’s descriptions of nature than for pure storytelling.

blytal@nysun.com