Whenever a new short-story writer emerges, the custom is to make comparison with a giant of the form: for male writers, Andre Dubus, early Hemingway and, of course, Raymond Carver are the usual suspects, but a close reading of this first collection by DW Wilson, whose story "The Dead Roads" won the 2011 BBC National Short Story award, calls a rather less obvious parallel to mind. Breece D'J Pancake only published six stories in his lifetime, committed suicide at the age of 27, and is represented solely by a single volume of Collected Stories, published in 1983. Such a short career and sparse output ought to suggest lost promise, and a wondering about what might have been, but Pancake's dozen finished works are so accomplished that Kurt Vonnegut was moved to remark to a friend: "I give you my word of honour that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know."

What Pancake had was a singular gift for combining taut, highly economical observations of men in their day to day lives with real tenderness and a restrained lyricism about the natural world  and it is this ability that one finds in DW Wilson. His characters are tough, sometimes hard-drinking skilled labourers and local police officers from the remote Kootenay Valley in British Columbia, men with names like Animal and Walla, but they are also tender, confused and painfully vulnerable  romantics, under the calluses, in the Scott Fitzgerald vein, yearning for love and a connection with the world around them, but too raw and frightened to make the attempt.

Naturally, that confusion and vulnerability emerges as cack-handed male tomfoolery that can get a man hurt, or even killed. One story begins: "A long time ago I shot Mike Twigg in the back with a potato cannon," and in the opening and closing pieces, a father and son, John and Will Crease, are seen at different stages of a lifelong struggle in which macho one-upmanship reveals a desperate, barely articulable love. In the first piece, "The Elasticity of Bone", John Crease, a police officer whose life choices have condemned him to the status of CFL (Constable For Life), travels with his 17-year-old son to a judo tournament. John is about to ship out for volunteer police work in Kosovo and Will is worried about him  a worry he is not able to voice directly to a man whose T-shirt slogan is "Pain Is Only Weakness Leaving The Body". Will is skilled in judo, but he is not in his father's weight class; nevertheless, he contrives to get moved up several weight divisions, so he can fight John and possibly injure him enough so that he doesn't have to go on his Kosovo assignment. The ending of this story is quiet and deeply moving, but when this father-son dynamic is taken up again, in the closing, title story, an unintended injury reveals the depth of love between two men who can sit down, after the catharsis of a fight or a drinking bout, "side by side each on wire spools, shoulders slumped and wrists on their thighs, elbows flung wide and knees damn near knocking  grinning like guys with no reason not to".

In between these two beautiful pieces sit 10 equally affecting stories about men and women working together on construction sites, or going on crazy, hopped-up drives into the mountains, or betraying and even killing one another without ever knowing why: there are a dozen in all. It is possible that there will never be a 12-story collection that surpasses Pancake's dozen short-form masterpieces, but Once You Break a Knuckle definitely stands in that company, and that is a massive achievement.

 John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is published by Jonathan Cape.