When anyone can be seduced or trapped into viewing hours of family vacations, celebrations photographed or filmed or Web pages advertising the anything to be known by anyone, why should someone forsake the ease of the visual for the complexity of language?

Because, when the poet uses the personal as a ladder to climb to an understanding beyond, a wisdom for all of us to embrace is the result. Many poets whose work shines with insight abound in Maryland, expecially in Baltimore and its immediate environs. Such poems, though rare in a collection that is too heavy on the 4x5 glossies, make Mariquita MacManus' "Rules of Living" (Brickhouse Books, 40 pages, $8) worth buying. From the poem titling the book comes smart advice: "Start lessons in yoga, my grandmother said,/as you get older -- say, at sixty or seventy -- /take up French or Swahili, take a new lover/but not, of course, the executor of your will."

"Bliss" (Stonewall, 40 pages, $8)is the work of a poet unafraid of heights. From his vantage points, Jeff Mann creates love poems that, in language tinged with the archaic, pose questions that might, if we each paused to answer, awaken us to lives more full than fragmented: "How many idylls is any life allotted?" ("Bliss") or "Amidst rude and savage-minded men,/what is more dangerous than tenderness?" ("Pupae").

Sandra Evans Falconer aptly names the vista poets try to lead themselves and their readers to as "Imagining the World" (Gateway Press, 36 pages, $10) and aptly describes why writer (and reader) travel the poetic landscape -- "At mid life, I need histories, /snapshots, resemblances,/a living story/still inventing itself all these years,/a story I am part of/my words, my breath,/moving across the pages" ("Going to Wales").

Chester Wickwire, 84-year-old chaplain emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, fills "Longs Peak" (Brickhouse Books, 78 pages, $10) with poetry richly informed by the activist stance he's held to regarding peace, civil rights and human rights issues here and abroad, by his 61-year marriage and by the polio that afflicted him as a young man.

After being diagnosed with an inoperable aneurysm and warned not to "do anything crazy," Wickwire climbs to the bleak alpine tundra of Longs Peak, where what he acknowledges as he thinks about himself and his three sons -- "Life is strained and small . . . I've wasted too much time, too many causes,/too much small talk,/haven't stopped to think" -- forms truths large enough for all readers to say "yes" within.

Also not to be missed are Geraldine Connolly's "Province of Fire" (Iris Press, 82 pages, $12), Ned Balbao's "Galileo's Banquet" (Washington Writers' Publishing House, 67 pages, $12) and Chezia Thompson-Cager's "Crossing into Fire" (Maisonneuve Press, 100 pages, $12.95), in which this exuberant writer explores poems as "pictures painted with words to capture essences."

Chapbooks, small pamphlets that sprung into being in the late 18th century, continue to be a staple of the poetry scene. Among those recently published are Hugh Burgess' "Penny Land" (Lite Circle Books, 28 pages, $4); Tillie Friedenberg's "November Fires" (WordHouse Inc., 29 pages, $7), and Laura Lynd's "Glamour for Breakfast" (Time Printers, 28 pages, $5), chosen as the ArtScape '98 Poetry Arts Award by Julia Wendell, whose third book of poems "Wheeler Lane" (Igneus Press, 83 pages, $9.95) has received considerable acclaim. Also noteworthy in this category are the revised edition of Judith McCombs' "Territories, Here & Elsewhere" (Mayapple Press, 216 pages, $6) and the self-published haiku collection by popular Baltimore poet Amani Na Baraka (Reggie Timpson) "I Like My Lips To Know ... They're Not Being Jived" (1998, 34 pages, $5).

Anthologies offer a fine way for readers to acquaint themselves with the variety of voices and styles prevalent. The fourth edition of "Function At The Junction" (Electric Press, 68 pages, $7), edited by Gary Blankenburg and Kevin Thornton and illustrated with the witty drawings of Wayne Hogan includes 64 poets and is an entertaining volume from the whimsical rhyme of Jenny Keith's "Cocky" -- "I hopped aboard a camel/and rode through a needle's eye;/Because I would not stop for death/I didn't have to die" through the mocking accuracy of Kevin Thornton's lines "The meeting was packed/like little fishes in tin,/like lemmings on the edge,/or people, crowding for a look/at success, as if success/cared back" ("Ladies Room Door").

Several fine poems -- Fran Wilde's "That Way," Stacy E. Tuthill's "Sixteen," Barbara Diehl's "Refrain," Barbara M. Simon's "Eyes" -- take on relations between mother and child. And several poems, including Joanne M. Bowen's "Gliding" and Anne Barney's "Confessions of a Professor," smartly define poetry itself.

Another fourth edition anthology is the privately printed "Pasta Poetics 1998," edited by Matt Hohner (30 pages, $6). The work of 12 poets is served up with recipes, and the proceeds from book sales are donated to Baltimore's Beans & Bread Soup Kitchen. "Margaret: Remembering a Life That Was Poetry," compiled and edited by Thomas Dorsett, Marta Knoblock and David Diorio (Icarus Books, 96 pages, $11.95), is a rewarding homage to Margaret Diorio, editor of Icarus, A Poetry Journal, who in 1986 with her husband David founded Icarus Books as well as the long-running poetry reading series at the Baltimore Arts & Peace Festival.

This invaluable compilation issued after Margaret's 1997 death, following years of valiantly fighting Parkinson's disease, includes correspondence between Margaret and Marianne Moore, Dorothy Day, Robert Penn Warren, May Sarton and Anne Tyler; 28 poems by contemporary Baltimore poets, including Gloria Oden and Sister Maura Eichner; reviews of Margarets books and 27 poems by Margaret herself.

There's much to like about poetry -- wisdom, intelligence, playfulness, imagination -- as Sue Tegeler in "(Found My) Calling" ("Function At The Junction #4") insightfully suggests, "Poetry is not craft, opening corrosive hearts,/ Stomping on notions of propriety, property, and the poverty of the soul,/ Sprinting to Mecca, turning toads into Rhodes scholars/ With the manners of a saint."

Rosemary Klein is editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and president of Maryland State Poetry & Literary Society. Currently, she is on leave from her associate professor position at Dundalk Community College and working at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Pub Date: 03/28/99