he origins of poetry and the visual arts are ancient, and their lives run parallel. When the painters of Lascaux drew their magical bison and horses and elk on the walls of their caves, it is hard to imagine that they did not also chant hunting songs about those same animals. The follies and heroics of the Greeks and their Olympian gods, which Homer sang of, also decorate Attic vases."

So begins the introduction to one of the most unusual and sumptuous books ever published by the University of Michigan Press, or any other publisher, for that matter. The ground rules for the 134-page, thickly papered, double-stitched and handsomely bound book, poet Richard Tillinghast, a professor of English and editor of the volume, explains in his introduction, involved inviting 30 poets and fiction writers to the U-M Museum of Art, where they would "choose a work of art from the permanent collection, and write something in response to it."

Most of the 30 writers are U-M faculty or alumni, several of them with national and international reputations. "Outsiders" who contributed include Thomas Lynch, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, Chase Twitchell and Diane Wakoski.

Each poem or prose piece accompanies a color plate of the work of art that inspired it. The book takes its title from the 1877 painting by Pier Celestino Gilardi. The poem by Molly Peacock, who lives in New York City and London, Ontario, Canada, is titled "Girl and Friends View Naked Goddess."

In a playful fantasy that turns into a serious statement about gender roles and the domain of art, Peacock imagines the young woman seated in the middle and the goddess thinking about changing roles:

...The shy one stares straight ahead—stunned
to see what she might become. What might
the goddess become if she could untighten
her gaze and be part of her watchers' scene?
Ruffled, laced, stockinged and corseted,
this girl's dying to shed it all....
And when their gazing is over, the girls will:
dash down the hall
with arms linked, out for a bite to eat and
lots of gossip at their visit's end
(for now they've seen her, and she's inside them,
a man's ideal, and they see they could be she,
the naked lady of a sculptor's whim,
cold as the floors they walk on)....

Museum Educational Curator Ellen Plummer supplies notes for each artistic work. The Gilardi painting, she writes "was part of the first major art collection donated to the University of Michigan, the bequest of Henry Cass Lewis." The sculpture that captivates the four viewers is the Medici Venus.

The Belgian painter Joos van Cleve's Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos ca. 1525 inspired Keith Taylor to write "On the Easy Life of Saints." Taylor contrasts the "ordinary distractions" of ordinary lives ("bringing the sheep/back home or washing clothes/ spreading manure on the fields/ or catching fish, adding what/we can to the everyday/exchange") with the "compensations" of sainthood ("getting locked up/on Patmos, for Christ's good sake,/with a couple of old books,/some blank paper, a new pen,/a distant view of the sea,/time to sit so quietly/that the birds might mistake us/for bushes").

In an appreciation, if not celebration, of ordinary life, Taylor concludes that while most of us will not have mystical visions like the "woman clothed in sea/colors holding a perfect child" that Saint John the Evangelist reported, our busy, unsaintly lives provide "unearned joy/(while walking dogs, putting kids/to bed, watching snow fall, when/we get a couple of hours/unexpectedly to read)". And what's more, "it's worth something/our ordinary vision/and we're almost sure it's real." - JW.