“New York Sketches” by E.B. White McNally Editions. 132 pp. $18, paperback

“New York Sketches,” a new collection of E.B. White’s musings about New York City, offers two pleasures, one nostalgic and one stylistic: There is the invocation of the New York of the 1930s and ’40s, a glamorous jumble of fast-talking journalists and smoky saloons, and there is the wry poetry of the writing.

In “Here Is New York,” a landmark 1949 essay that was published as a stand-alone book in 2000, White remarked that the city “blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.” He may well have been describing both the place and its chroniclers. White was at once private and participatory, a native and a tourist: A longtime New Yorker who eventually went into self-imposed exile in Maine, he wrote with both the loving indulgence of someone who lived in the city and the giddy awe of a new visitor.

His simultaneous intimacy and distance yield jewels of observation that glint on every page of “Sketches.” The sound of trains in Grand Central Terminal is “the noise of destinations”; a dog darting down the street is “a sturdy black animal with an idiot love of life.” White had a genius for approaching language at a slight, surprising angle. When he wrote about a waitress who spilled buttermilk on him, he did not note that he was covered in the stuff but rather, “I was all buttermilk.” Later, “I rose from my chair, a smear.”

This is vintage White: These sentences boast remarkable economy (“I was all buttermilk” is four impossibly vivid words), but they are neither astringent nor ascetic. White displays none of the mannered understatement of a Hemingway, none of the icy detachment of a Didion. His brand of irony is amused and affectionate, and if he condenses and compresses, it is because he relishes the weight of each word. He cannot stand to see any language squandered.

In one sketch, for instance, he laments “the sudden popularity of the word ‘personalized.’ This crummiest of all adjectives attempts to express an idea that is both vague and silly. The latest use of it we encountered was in a Schenley’s ad, mentioning a ‘personalized bottle.’ Who for? A bottleized man?” For a writer of such exacting precision, the abuse of the word is inextricable from the abuse of the thought. How can a whiskey marketed to everyone be customized to anyone, except insofar as one consumer comes to resemble every other – except, that is, insofar as people become as fungible as products? Insofar as they are bottleized? That the inelegance of the term personalized – that harsh -ized! – was an indictment of the sentiment could have occurred only to a man who made each syllable earn its keep.

“New York Sketches” is not as substantial as “Here Is New York,” White’s definitive homage. There is nothing quite like an essay in the book. Instead, it is populated by comic poems, at least one short story featuring talking sparrows and a handful of witty “Definitions.” Save for one “interview” with White’s terrier, Daisy, there is not much reporting. (Daisy explains that she is entitled to a desultory growl at anyone who looks at her askance, and who could disagree?) For the most part, the “Sketches” are impressions, exemplars of that wonderful and obsolete form: the feuilleton.

The short pieces are as diverse as the city itself, for White has as many subjects as he has genres. “Over a period of thirty years,” he notes, “I have occupied eight caves in New York, eight digs – four in the Village, one on Murray Hill, three in Turtle Bay.” During those 30 years, from the ’20s through the ’50s, he treated curiosities as varied as the nests of the New York pigeons and their various architectural styles; the vexations that attend “Trying to View a Sunset Through the Fence Around the Reservoir in Central Park,” as one peeved poem is titled; and the mating habits of snails.

White’s New York is a wild place, full of strange animals and startling occurrences. In one anecdote, a bat makes its way into an Upper East Side apartment. In another, the narrator advises a friend, “We cannot tell you everything we know about the gastropods because we know, possibly, more than is good for us.” Even that prosaic bird so often found picking at abandoned french fries, “the city pigeon,” turns out to be “a descendant of the wild rock dove, a bird of cliffs and ledges.” New York suits the pigeon because what the creature needs “is just what the city provides in abundance: a nook, a ledge, a recess, a niche, a capital, an outcropping, the tin elbow of a downspout, the bronze musette bag of a war hero, the concrete beard of a saint, the narrow channel between two buildings.”

Nothing escapes notice, remark or delight. Even “snails have a kind of nobility,” and even minutiae are dazzlements. “There is no earliness … quite like the earliness of a city morning in the great heat of summer, the audible heat, the visible heat, odorous and vaporous and terrible and seductive.” When White leaves New York, he misses “the thick cold blast of air that comes out at you from a new building when you pass by” in the summer, the way that the city “was always bringing up something out of your past, something ridiculous or lovely or glistening.”

A world described in such loving detail overflows with wonders: The rigorous attention in “Sketches” is a kind of re-enchantment.