To the Center of the Earth

An art historian at Johns Hopkins, Fried ventures skillfully into poetry with this collection of precise, imagistic poems. The work is focused on the natural world, calling on such themes as ``The Thunder Orchard'' and ``The Flash of Lightning.'' The words themselves are carefully chosen. A few poems, such as the single-line ``Powers'' and ``Poem,'' are so brief that they seem to resist the reader, and in these the sensibilities of an artist seem curiously absent. Yet the speaker in other poems can be remarkably charming, and the smallness of the poems often belies a real depth of feeling. In ``Packing Up,'' he describes leaving a disinterested lover, and concludes, ``I stack another room of books/ Inside three tea-chests and nail them shut./ I wish words mattered less to me.'' In ``Cloudburst,'' Fried writes of the experience, ``The mist rolled away,/ I stood there drenched and shaking/ Transformed into a bull.'' Fried has a gift for keen observation, and it is interesting to imagine both larger poems and the possible translation of some of these lines onto the canvas. (Dec.)