“Just Saying … Selected Columns” by Tom Sadowski; Maine Authors Publishing, Thomaston, Maine, 2021; 392 pages, paperback, $21.95.

You know things have gotten weird when the world seems so cracked the apparently delirious among us start sounding like the voice of reason. This goes switchback double for Tom Sadowski, who had a keen understanding of crazy even before covid and sedition struck.

For about a decade Sadowski, of Lincolnville, wrote the “Just Saying …” column for the Free Press weekly, now based in Camden, in which his divagations set us all straight on wide ranges of domestic and other craziness, kind of a midcoast parallel to my Central Maine newspapers colleague J.P. Devine. Tom’s book “Just Saying,” a hefty selection of those columns, reached print this summer just weeks after his unexpected death in June. Which was an especially heavy event, given the lighthearted perceptivity of his columns.

Every quirk of life got his attention. Pets, toboggans, getting old, the third grade, the taste of coffee (disappointing), “stuff,” technology, daylight saving time, shopping, tenants, yard sales. The importance of writing your own obituary. Why he and his wife moved to Maine from Alaska in 1991 (“short, warm winters”). Things that seem crazy but you keep to yourself in case you seem crazy for thinking it’s crazy, like what physicians are thinking when they ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10 (“What kind of a question is that?”).

He was also preoccupied with words, complaining about his inability to spell and bizarre grammar that some of us, again, are too embarrassed to admit bewilders us. If you’ve ever noticed that the pronoun in the sentence “It’s raining” has no antecedent, you’re on Tom Sadowski’s page. Practically every column was filled with gratuitous plays on words – “Tick Talk”; humor is not rocket science, it’s harder; he was back and forth on his support for International Waffle Day.

Sometimes he gives the impression of being just scatterbrained, but there was method in his madness most of the time. In the 2019 column “Lying,” he observes that “public lying has become quite popular lately.” He explains that “a bald-faced lie” is a falsehood everyone knows is a falsehood, while “the big lie,” he says, “is a lie so ridiculously preposterous that people tend to believe it because they just can’t imagine that anyone would have the audacity to tell such an untruth.” This was written long before the aftermath of the 2020 election. I don’t know if this puts Tom in the category of oracle, in which the future is foretold in a state of apparent derangement.

Tom’s other book, co-authored with Jimmie Froehlich, “On the Road to Tok & Other Photographic Travesties” (2003), is available from online book sellers, though “Just Saying” is not. You may be able to get a copy by writing to The Red Cottage, 258 Main St., Lincolnville Center, ME 04849. If this doesn’t work, please feel free to email me.

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“I Never Promised You a Cherry Orchard” by Danielle Woerner; Sunrise Song Press, Milbridge, Maine, 2021; 36 pages, paperback, $15.

And speaking of plays on words, I also received this fall the small photo-illustrated book “I Never Promised You a Cherry Orchard: Japanese short-form poetry served with a Twist” by Danielle Woerner, of Milbridge. The title seems to play on the shared title of a novel, a film and a song (“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”), aligning the roses with the cherry blossoms that turn up often in Japanese poetry.

In an array of fonts, colors and page layouts, short impressionistic poems of mostly three lines imitating the haiku form surround photos of flowers, birds, cute dogs, boats, sunsets and ocean scenery. Most of the poems are markedly more playful than the works alluded to in the title. The more sober, reflective passages have the tone of this later entry, set in a photo of a rainbow: “The song of the sky, / earth’s rhythm beneath my feet: / I walk where worlds meet.”

Danielle Woerner is a songwriter and co-founder of the Sunrise County Arts Institute. “I Never Promised You a Cherry Orchard” is available from local and online book sellers.

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first and third Fridays of each month. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact him at universe@dwildepress.net.