Poetry collections that include long lists of books that “shaped the development” of the work often suffer from one of two problems: either the poems are so bloated with information that they plod along like notes toward a thesis; or they speak from so far inside the poet’s research that the reader is excluded.

Stephanie Bolster’s Pavilion suffers a bit from both of these pitfalls. The presiding spirit in Pavilion is the painter Vermeer, whose “Girl with a Pearl Earring” provides the major subject matter for the book’s final series, “Girl,” and who appears in other poems throughout the collection. But while four pages of acknowledgements attest to Bolster’s considerable knowledge of her subject, neither the painter nor his work truly come to life in Pavilion.

What we get too often is a poet thinking about writing about Vermeer: “One winter, D. and I were women painted/by Vermeer. Light slanted in on us and on the tapestry/across our table. She said my poems did not go deep enough.” Here, as in other passages, we get hints at what drives the speaker to obsess, but it’s hard to see why she has come to Vermeer as her particular subject.

As in her previous works, including the Governor General’s Award-winner White Stone: The Alice Poems, Bolster demonstrates considerable skill with form and language. Listen to the complicated internal music in this passage from “Train Windows”: “I stood aside at Fredericton Junction/and let the speed and flare approach./Wind flailed my hair, the gathered dark/dispersed.” But as long as her obsession remains exclusively intellectual, the poems feel more like notes toward a greater work.

The sequence “Japanese Pavilion” is more successful because Bolster’s notes on Japanese aesthetics are interspersed with passages that place these observations in an emotional context. Here too, though, a sustained meditation might have provided more than these disjointed snippets. In future, one hopes that Bolster will give her lyric gifts freer reign to reflect not just on what makes art like Vermeer’s interesting, but what makes it important.