Frozen and Fluid Images

...One hardly sees why the forms of little girls should ever be covered," he wrote enthusiastically...

...Hold that pose...

...And you had just that, poised conjuror, had your cold and commonplace legerdemain...

...His previous collection of poems, Misgivings (1979), contained a gallery of verbal portraits based on photographs the French artist, Nadar, took of prominent contemporaries...

...Art is both death in its immobility, and immortality in its permanence...

...Besides, most of us are fascinated by photographs—especially those frozen images snapped from our own lives, or pictures of the famous...

...Delacroix is told, "Like Baudelaire, your best prophet, you despised/1 caged hopes, crass progress...

...Lining Up contains yet another letter, acknowledging that, "Charles, a means has been found of making time/ accelerate within a lens and then/ upon a screen, whereby the world can see / / 'the thing you saw that lovely summer day': / carrion, rot incarnate, charnal (all/ the words that put death in any body...

...Art, for Nemerov, boils down to the tales, scribblings, tunes we make up about a universe too vast to comprehend: "A story many times told in many ways, / The set of random accidents redeemed/By one more accident, as though chaos/ Were the order that was before creation came...

...This may strike one as sounding less like the nonsense of Alice in Wonderland than the aphoristic wit of Oscar Wilde, but never mind...

...A prism hung in the window catches the light both literally and figuratively: No diamond from deep earth could celebrate So well our long engagement with the world As faceted glass dangled against the pane To swing advantage from the sun's long swing Low, through the darkness and the burning cold Until, sweet chariot, he brings us up Again, poking the crocus through the snow Again, and once more turns might into may...

...Howard frequently addresses his subjects as if he were standing right behind the camera, offering comments to break the tedium of holding one position so long...

...Each of these pictures seems designed to inspire speculations about the character of the sitter...

...Of course, moving pictures capture Time's flow, and thus, deterioration of all living matter...

...In Lining Up (Atheneum, 88 pp., $13.95), Richard Howard gives this feeling fuller exposure...

...Gradually, we hear Carroll's voice fading in from 30 years earlier...

...Vegetables are slow...

...Sitters" to history have long intrigued him...

...As the two voices counterpoint each other, we discover that the patient's fantasies have been shaped by Carroll's teasing innuendo and the enforced quietness...

...Howard has taken to addressing the ghost of Charles Baudelaire as both master and alter-ego...

...Similarly, he finds comfort in the ritual progression of seasons...

...Like blind men, each feeling a different part of the elephant, we cannot predict the whole from what little we grasp...

...Nemerov uses this "dumbshow of predicaments" to represent our fragmentary comprehension...

...He is helping arrange her for a picture...

...Nemerov writes some of his best poems about painters, since he shares their keen eyesight and fascination with form...

...and comparable examples of Life's little ironies...

...As the minidrama opens, the time is 1925, the scene, a psychiatrist's consulting room (Freud's...

...Instead, it stresses the mysterious connections we invent to make sense of things...

...The poems of Howard Nemerov concern themselves less with the nature of things than with how we perceive them...

...Art is, for Howard, "where the burial-places of our memory give up their dead...

...Howard has created a clever illustration of the crippling potential of art— which, in his particular understanding, is often at war with life...

...Of course, having such a thing at home is preposterous: it is by having preposterous possessions that one can keep them at arm's length...

...Remembering the sculptor's rough-hewn figures, Howard takes mental snapshots of "any six" men and women standing in the crowd, imagining them transformed into comparable statues of nobility and salvation: "in here, now and forever, death/ of a kind, as if a man/ needed a diamond and was given the moon...

...Why should you hide your hands / that had so often produced/what he called the emphatic truth of gesture//in life's great circumstances...

...the effect of the Equal Rights Movement in the Church, whereby " the pin-up girl becomes the Nail-up Lady...

...Yet such misapprehensions may themselves result in an imaginative act...

...Nemerov, like Howard, feels the continuity between past and present strongly...

...Lining Up also offers a quirky view of a quite different sort of photographer, Lewis Carroll, whose collodion studies of children included many nudes...

...Master, I too feel chilly and grown old...

...Inside the Onion (Chicago, 63 pp., $9.95) contains ruminations on a macrocosm revealed by the microcosm of "A Sprig of Dill...

...Inside the Onion is not really about our inability to know...

...Indeed, the Nadar portrait facing the poem shows a reptilian countenance...

...The section called "Homage to Nadar II" in the new volume continues the series with descriptive verses on such figures as Millet,-Berlioz, Verdi, and Michelet...

...an answer to life, though not the one we were waiting to hear: even before we get in, futility bears down on fatigue in irresponsible foyers where a man can know everything but nothing else...

...The omnivorous package waits, and our riches blind us to our poverty...

...He loves jokes, puns and small conundrums he calls "gnomes" because they tie the seemingly unrelated together, forming a new link unperceived before...

...No doubt we resort to these metaphors because for many people the visual communicates more directly than words...

...he questions the author of "To His Coy Mistress" incredulously, contemplating the uncontrolled growth of beans and squash running riot in his garden...

...A Blind Man at the Museum" is guided by his wife, who pushes a pram containing speechless babies past "grazing cows and crucifixions and I Self-portraits where the painter's mirrored eyes / Reflect themselves unseeing in the plane/ Eternity of art, unable to look out...

...a putative letter from Dante's long-suffering wife to Ann Landers, complaining about Beatrice...

...He converses with dead poets as with old friends...

...Now her sexual climaxes must mimic the stillness of a photograph, must be moments of "timeless suspense...

...Did you ever see a needle so huge...

...Calling to mind Browning's mordant "A Tocatta of Galupi's," also a carpediem, the modern poet concludes, "When things are over that's what they are, over...

...Howard exploits this aspect by creating a series of nesting boxes, as it were: the core of one artist portrayed by another, and elucidated by a third...

...Lining Up," the striking title poem, focuses on a motley collection of people waiting to enter Pasadena's art museum, where Rodin's The Burghers of Calaisis on display...

...Slow, dear Marvell...

...The narrator confesses her sexual passivity to the doctor...

...Striders" who walk on water but can't swim...

...The poet likes to imagine that the blind man used to be an authority on these very pictures, whose titles the wife reads To the twins who see but cannot know or say The scumble of the black impasto'd skull Behind all this, the agony of the eye That sees the hand that acts but cannot see Beneath the finish of the age, the art...

...She must remain motionless for at least three minutes—the exposure necessary for the wet-plate process: Your pose is my knot, and this camera my way to sew...

...But even the frozen image of a photograph catches an object in some moment of decay...

...You were the first to use photographs—for the poses/ of' Attila and his Hordes Annihilating the Culture of Italy.' " And here is Howard contemplating Giacomo Meyerbeer, who deliberately gave the public exactly what it wanted in his popular operas peppered with sex, religion and violence: You wanted fame on your own terms or no fame— no hollow victories...

...Between the universe and our five senses "lies language, our fluid coupling with the world...

...In Memory of the Master Poet Robert Browning" ruefully wonders about the death of Grand Opera and former ideals...

...I hesitate to point out an anachronism because it is so unusual for Howard, but his poem, "Move Still, Still So" has Carroll taking photographs in 1895, whereas he had given this up 15 years earlier, probably because of moral scruples...