Little-known fact: The award-winning poet Donald Hall, the 14th Poet Laureate of the U.S., wrote an elegiac collection of short stories, The Ideal Bakery, published in paperback in 1988. Like the Vintage Contemporary series, the Perennial Library paperbacks had a distinctive design and published prestigious writers. Perhaps Perennial writers were less hip, but no less brilliant.

I enjoyed The Ideal Bakery, a poignant exercise in quiet realism, which has been sitting on the shelf for years. Hall’s spare style complements these intense, lyrical stories. It is not quite minimalist, but reflects the trend toward simple prose in the late 20th century. (He dedicates the book to Raymond Carver, the much-lauded minimalist, and Carver’s partner, the poet Tess Gallagher). Hall is fiercely focused on classic relationships between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and teachers and students. The stories end with quiet revelations.

“Keats’s Birthday” is one of my favorites. A couple from Rhode Island vacation in Rome, where Eleanor, whose dissertation focuses on Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” lectures on the romantic poets to Richard, who cheerfully “pays homage to the dead poets.” On their last day, a gang of young gypsy girls attack Richard and steal their passports and plane tickets from his back pocket. Richard chases the girls and retrieves the stolen papers, but Eleanor is furious. Why isn’t Richard ever angry? Eleanor seems to have confused him with the Romantics, when he is just a good-tempered man who works at a stationery store.

In the complex story, “The Figure of the Woods,” a father and son travel to a farm in western Connecticut. The newly-divorced Alexander wants to share his love of the country with his son, Davis, an indoorsy kid who prefers to read Agatha Christie. But Davis becomes enthusiastic about catching trout, and father and son bond over fishing. And then the idyll of country life is interrupted by a disaster.

The title story also focuses on a father and son. During the narrator’s mother’s second pregnancy, and later her hospitalization for post-partum depression, his father takes him out for doughnuts at The Ideal Bakery. They get acquainted with the baker and his wife, and the bakery is a refuge from home. The narrator says, “That’s my story, no story at all: A boy and his father eat crullers.” But of course there’s more: he tells the story of himself and his father, and his long-lived mother’s recovery from madness.

The odd, experimental story, “Argument and Persuasion,” is divided into distinctive parts. The story alternates between parts of the story of a murder told by the teacher and events outside the classroom. Dr. Silva, a teacher who got kicked out of a Ph.D. program after failing his exams twice, teaches at a women’s finishing school. Every year he tells his students the story of a murder of an unfaithful woman: their assignment is to write a persuasive essay about who is morally to blame for the murder. The results are disturbing: most of the students blame the female victim. And he begins to think about the conditioning that has made these girls so passive and dismissive of the virtues of their own sex.

I enjoyed most of these stories, but my advice is to start with “Keats’s Birthday.” After finishing the book, go back to the much slower opening stories. If I have one criticism, it is that some of the stories are too quiet. But the best of these stories are gems.