Look for an hour at a front yard or a highway median: Will you find spots of beauty or land misused? Tulips or “trash — / clear plastic — at the seam / between brick path and lawn”? Will you feel more connected to your community afterward or more alone? Will you end up considering not just how streetlights outline garbage bins but how your brain construes their “turned-on particulars”?

Joseph Massey has thought hard about such things; better yet, he makes them into disturbing, terse poems. One page invokes “weeks indoors / watching the lines / that cross, that stain / and form a field” until melting snow reveals “peripheral forsythia.” Elsewhere “Ice on the field / recedes. Something — / silver cellophane trash — / flares in the monochrome.” That’s a whole poem. Massey’s brightness on brightness could represent a soul on fire, an ugly duckling becoming a swan or the evils of litter. Or it could stand for nothing other than Massey’s attempt to show, in so few words, how “perception’s / a process,” an exhilarating or appalling event inside his, or anyone’s, head.

A Massey poem is a revelation of place. The first lines resemble horizons, where “sky divides to frame / a version of / a world.” Like a photographer, he knows where the light comes from and where it goes: In “Route 31” he finds “Each strip-mall pennant blurred./ So much ­metal / shoving sun / the sun shoves back.” As in landscape photography, much has happened and much could happen, but we don’t watch as it happens. Nor do we meet people.

What the poems lose in action, they make up in sensory immediacy: In a Massachusetts summer, “Gasoline and honeysuckle / unravel the air.” This poet who notes each cloud wisp, each tire tread, also attends to each vowel and consonant, turning many a sentence into “a ­rhizome / of slant rhymes.” “Gauge,” for example, ends on an adroit array of similar (not identical) long a’s — “a wasp lands / on the page, / an unwritten phrase.”