For several reasons, most of them beyond my control — including the fact that this morning I could not for the life of me think of the English word “fennel” but easily came up with the Italian word “finocchio” — this is going to be the final Off Radar column.

No cause for alarm. What leads to this is the perfectly natural, normal process of time grinding things down. Friends of my same uncertain age report the same word retrieval and other, more external issues I do. All good things must come to an end, including book review columns and your mind.

A few weeks ago I received a book in the mail from a friend still further along the grind than I am. I already had a copy — several copies, actually, which he very well knew and did not forget. But he sent one to me anyway to share his delight in discovering in his basement an ancient cardboard box full of copies of this book. He had forgotten they even existed, and dragged them anonymously from home to home to home where the box ended up nearly 50 years later in his house in Searsport.

This book is Jim Bishop’s “Mother Tongue,” published in Portland in 1975 by Contraband Press. Mentioning it here brings some things around full circle, for me. It was the Contraband magazine vortex of energy of Jim, Bruce Holsapple, Scott Penney, Peter Kilgore and others in 1970s Portland that launched my patchy public life in literature. As it turns out, I was right from the beginning about “Mother Tongue.” Rereading it for the first time in a couple of decades was like discovering the forgotten box. It is rich with some quintessentially skillful, insightful Maine postwar poetry. (If you would like a copy, they are available for the cost of postage by emailing me or Jim, jbishop@maine.edu.)

So I had been thinking to write more thoroughly about “Mother Tongue,” until this matter-of-fact about the ice storms of old age and finance broke in and it became clear time’s obstructions are prevailing, as they always do. I had thought to get some words in about Carl Little’s new poetry collection, “Blanket of the Night” (Deerbrook Editions, 2023), which delightfully covers some of this self-same territory; Jefferson Navicky’s newest extremely odd book about Portland, “Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands” (AC Books, 2023), which got lost last year in the worst events so far of old age at my house; “Alive to This,” (Littoral Books, 2024), an anthology of new nonfiction by Maine writers; “The Hour of Blue” (Flat Bay Press, 2023), a reissued novel by retired UMaine Machias professor Robert Froese about the Earth’s reaction to environmental degradation ; and Agnes Bushell’s newest novel, “Verity and Perpetua” (Littoral Books, 2024).

But like the word fennel, they are not to be. Not in this moment. Today’s is the last of the Off Radar reviews, a marathon which actually started more than 25 years ago in a different Maine daily newspaper and came to the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel just more than 10 years ago. Thank you to the editors for giving me extremely wide latitude on which books to talk about. I hope it has helped cover some Maine literary territory that might not otherwise have gotten mapped. Unlike the old days of newspapers, the torch of these notices still burns conveniently online, with the proper credentials.

Now where did I put that jar of finocchio seeds . . .