Poet reverses calligraphic process in works

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Jan 1, 2006

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You may have seen an example of calligraphic art, where the artist uses letters and symbols in cunning arrangements that form pictures of other things -- faces, figures, scenes of nature. You can read the words then, Zen-like, just stare at their outlines, the ascenders and descenders and serifs, until the image buried there suddenly becomes apparent. Calligraphic art can be very beautiful.

Louisiana poet David Middleton has reversed the process of calligraphic art: His latest poetry chapbook, The Habitual Peacfulness of Gruchy (LSU Press, $16.95 softcover) comprises poems constructed of words Middleton "sees" when he looks at paintings. Not just any paintings either. Each of the Gruchy poems describes a painting by 19th century French painter Jean-Francois Millet.

Millet was a realist who favored agricultural workers as subjects for his works, such as the women collecting the stray wheat straw in an already cut and thrashed field in the painting "The Gleaners."

Two women bend, a third strains, back half-bowed,

Searching for stalk in well-picked-over fields,

Their meager gleaning clutched to spine, knee, thigh,

Leavings strewn in stubble on this shorn ground.

Middleton finds in the pastoral scenes of Millet a metaphor for the beauty of life and also for the inescapability of fate. In "Little Goose Girl," the poet sees the image of an innocent young girl tending fowl as not just a peaceful country view but as an echo of Eden before the fall.

This place, if east of Eden cannot be

Removed by more than one or two degrees

Of swaying shades of overgrowth whose sheen

Startles the birds and girl from dream to dream.

Again and again in these poems, Middleton raises the image of seeds and sowing, life renewed as in that first garden. Yet such images carry darker implication as in "Path Through the Wheat."