To call a collection of portraits and poems The Lines of the Poet is to indulge in a pun, not so much to be facetious as, in the root meaning of the word, to make a point. To explicate or unfold the pun is like opening an old fishing box, to come up with a mess of lines : graphic lines, written lines, character lines, and age lines and perhaps a few lures, a few hooks and barbs.

The portfolio is itself such a box. It is, admittedly, a limited, rare, rather expensive box. And for that reason some may consider it peripheral, even alien to the spirit of art. Yet it seems to me they would be quite wrong; such a portfolio embodies the central spirit of art, particularly in the case of the graphic artist and the poet.

Going back in time, there is a point where the alphabet becomes drawing. Unfolding our letters we discover the elemental lines of ox, house, camel, head hand, and mouth. The portfolio itself points back to the elemental : wood and rags for paper, oil and charcoal for ink, wooden combs which the artist used to make the first sketches, stones on which he made the final lithographs, metal slugs which were used to print the text, and the hand which wrote the poems and drew the lines and made the paper and set the type, and manufactured the whole.

It is a function of art, surely, to return us to our senses, and yet make our world articulate in human form. In this particular work, animal, vegetable, and mineral unite in a human handling to make the world speak as if its moments were a mouth.

From hand to mouth : it is the paradox of art, as of our technologically articulated mass society, that one can break the cliche and give the world a handmade or a tailor-made articulation only at great cost. Hard lines. But, as I said, the portfolio is a Pandora's box of lines.

The Chinese refer to a style of painting that depends on colour more than on line as the boneless style. The world before sex, the world of the amoeba and, perhaps, of sub-atomic particles, is boneless. But the human world depends upon a skeleton, upon the bones of syntax. The more life grows articulate, the more it leaves behind a trace in earth, in clay, in legal and poetic writ of hard lines: skeletal ideographs and petroglyphs, lithographs and autographs. The paragraphs, one might call them, of life so many individual by-lines.

Certainly Morton Rosengarten's portraits are not it the boneless style.Nor are the poems. For the poems were chosen by ear, that is, for their syntax, their line. Knowing that each writer could be represented by only one poem, and having decided that the poem should be relatively short, I was happily relieved of the obligation to choose the best or most powerful or even the most characteristic of the author's work. I could choose what I liked, as long as it had achieved the directness and immediacy, the seeming inevitability of a personal, speaking voice. And the result ?

"They are all love poems," someone said. Almost. All alike tend to speak with a classic lyric voice, of the self, the body, the finite world and the damage of time. Yet each speaker retains some unique, essential accent. Some flee from love; some from whom love has fled speak hard truths; some, with irony, bid for love, knowing its price; some, knowing its unlikelihood, give thanks. The bearhug that Ondaatje gives his boy is "that squeeze of death" the father feels more immediately than his son. The poems are alike in speaking of difference, the poignant particular, like the berries that preoccupy Ralph Gustafson, that have their seeds on the outside, and that are the measure of mountains.

The poets represented here should need no introduction. No history of Canadian poetry over the past sixty years could well be written without mentioning their names. We know, of course, that the poet is largely invisible in the mass media. Poets may not be, as Shelley claimed, the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But they may be governors of a sort like enzymes working invisibly through language to maintain some kind of balance between the body politic and the body of our individual fate. They present us with a few lines, which may yet be a measure of the mass.

So let the poems themselves be their introduction. Let them delight us even as they remind us, in the words of a still younger poet, Sharon Theson, of the " hopelessness of what we are ". That is the classic business of art. As it is of Rosengarten's portraits.

D.G.Jones