FALMOUTH — Steve Luttrell likes to quote Robert Frost when he answers the question about why he writes.

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession,” Frost is said to have said.

To which Luttrell adds, “I suffer from poetry.”

Past Portland poet laureate, Luttrell is back in the spotlight with a new collection of nearly 90 poems, “Plumb Line.” It’s his fifth published collection of poems and feels more weighty than the others.

That’s because these poems took all of 10 years to write. There’s a lot of accumulated angst and joy in here. The poems encompass marriage, divorce and love affairs. There are poems about dogs, poems for friends and poems about winter and rising tides.

Making poems for friends is the reward of the poetry affliction, Luttrell said. “It brings you into and sustains you in a community of other people.”

Another theme in the book is technology and its advancement through society. “Landscape with Machines” comes to terms with smart phones that know us by touch and can read our eyes.

He’s concerned about too much information in the information age. A poem he’s working on now, which has the working title “Citation Needed,” is about information, presented as fact, that isn’t factual. He’s concerned that “people are learning how to unlearn” and wonders what it means when we as a society make important, life-changing decisions based on faulty information and assumptions.

Luttrell, a Portland native who lives in Falmouth, served as Portland poet laureate from 2009 to 2011. Among other things, he put poetry on local access TV, with “Poet’s Cafe.” The work of the poet laureate doesn’t end with the expiration of a term in office, he said. As publisher of the The Cafe Review, a quarterly journal of art and poetry that he’s edited for 25 years, Luttrell is doing as much to advance poetry now when he was poet laureate.

Luttrell travels often with his poems, and this book will keep him on the road. It’s published by North Atlantic Books, based in Berkeley, California – a fact that amuses and pleases Luttrell. It amuses him because North Atlantic Books sounds like it should be based in Maine. It pleases him because the book is getting coast-to-coast attention and international distribution.

Luttrell has a summer full of readings lined up, and is planning a fall trip to Britain.