IN THIS COLLECTION of 10 stories, M. T. Kelly explores, from a variety of angles, ways that we all - but men in particular - both exercise and suffer from our power to distance others. Crossing or choosing not to cross the lines that separate us from those we would understand, love, or simply know can be a difficult and troubling exercise for sensibilities that are wary, alert, intelligent, and caring. Such a sensibility informs most of M. T. Kelly`s narrators and, at times, becomes a liability when their analysis and observation replace the dramatization short stories achieve at their best. These are not stories that exaggerate life to operatic proportions, but rather realize how akin changes in relationships can be to changes in weather. And indeed, Kelly excels at describing changes in light and air. To cite only one example, the narrator in "The South Shore` - a story studded with some very funny dialogue - describes the day on which he meets Audrey, his new acquaintance from Nova Scotia, for lunch in Toronto: The day was full of that bone-dry March light when snow crumbles and air is full of sand and brightness. The sky hurts the eyes; there are no subtleties; there is no fall melancholy. Gritty light is all encompassing. One might say that about the stories in this collection: they are lit by a kind of gritty light. When in "All that Wild Wounding" a man attends his high school`s 20th reunion, he faces for the first time the ugly consequences of an act of violence he committed against the girl he once loved. Ironically, his recognition and even his movement toward self-acceptance are made possible by the spiritual clarity of the very woman he wounded. In "Darling I Have Found Myself in You," Kelly evokes with precise, poignant detail the "gritty light" of a changed consciousness - that of 21-year-old Judith Cairns, who has learned she is about to die. Instinctively, she reaches after remembered images that may comfort, but only to reject their deceits. Her thought, "what a lie so many things were," is carried to extremes in "Grief," where we see a young woman radically trapped by bonds of family, sexual relationship, and her own impoverished imagination. Kelly`s male narrators tend to be hard on themselves - suspicious, self-aware, judgemental, easily bored or irritated. They suspect poses of power, in themselves and others. They suspect as well their own needs. Hear one narrator explain why he asked his friend, McSween, who is a distinct liability, to join him and a newly met woman for lunch: Unfortunately, I asked McSween as well. This kind of self-destructive need for approval, which nearly always goes awry, must have something to do with the idea of family, bringing the best girl home to meet mom and dad. Except there is no mom and dad, only showing off. So many pleasures and gestures seem to need other eyes to even exist. Later, finally convinced that he and Audrey can never really connect, he says: "....our histories were too different, the spaces between us too vast to travel quickly, or even in a lifetime; like the country." In these stories people connect only tangentially. However slight, oblique, or transient, however, such moments of felt connection are to be valued (even as they are questioned): the moment of breathing toward the one you love, in the darkness of a tent, after surviving together a troubled canoe trip north with an obnoxious guide; the moment of seeing in memory how lovely is the woman you have loved: Susan and I... never seemed to touch each other the way some lovers do. But then who are you ever close to? Most great passions are only obsessions, whatever your theory. You love something missing in yourself, you love an archetype, you love a god shining through your beloved. It doesn`t matter. A lot of times you don`t love the person. I did know that Susan would be important to me in all my life, even when we were just marking time... A certain desolation, poignancy, and sadness marks Breath Dances Between Them. There are no explosions of joy. There are only cherished moments of perception and tenderness, caught briefly in a world where connectedness is always chancy, always in peril.