Imagists like Ezra Pound used to throw around the phrase “ut pictura poesis,” which means “as is painting so is poetry.” The saying suggested that a poem draws out the same sensations as a painting, even uses similar esthetic tools, and that a poem might read as a painting in words. Some of today’s younger poets might translate the above maxim to “as is film so is poetry.” The inescapable influence of film on writing is not a bad thing. Problems arise, however, when a poem would make a better film.

The poems in Jason Dewinetz’s Moving to the Clear successfully capture moments in a highly cinematic and visual style. Unfortunately, Dewinetz’s technique, which utilizes a loose form of free verse, tends to overlook the poetic sensibility that celebrates the shaping quality of language. Much of this free verse lacks such successful elements of poetic intention as diction, trope, and rhythm, all elements that reign in language while simultaneously lifting a poem’s themes. The images explored over the book’s four sections rarely evoke reflection or ambiguity, making the poems’ meanings feel overdetermined and editorialized.

The second section, reflecting on the work of painter Théodore Gericault’s “Severed Limb Paintings,” parallels the fragmentary nature of sexual love, and the language to describe that love, with the painter’s obsession with the human form. The poems here do convey the inherent creepiness of obsession, but their narrow lines and inconsequential spacing detract from the believability of the narrator’s artistic kinship to Gericault. Again, the poems function better as snapshots or clips of cinéma-vérité than a sustained percolation of the language of desire.

When Dewinetz does succeed, the wait is sometimes worth it. The irresolute ending of “Undressing for bed” is unsettling and evocative: “As though that air ripple/has found me here,/suspended or reeling/on the way to bed.” But such moments, which value words over pictures, are far too rare.