In recent years, fans of Norman Rockwell, with the assistance of some art historians, have attempted to lift him into the canon of high art. As a fan of midcentury American illustration, I don’t really care how he is assessed on that scale: like the recurring fantasy that underlies so much of our politics of a quiet, suburban family life untroubled by modernity, Rockwell’s paintings will last as long as our shared, nostalgic, rose-tinted idea of the American century lasts. Americans know these paintings like they know little other art; they’re as familiar as old friends.

That’s a big part of the reason that an interesting little book of poems put out by Holart Books this spring works. The volume, Nostalgia’s Thread, by Randall R. Freisinger, consists of ten poems inspired by familiar Rockwell paintings. The poems aren’t exactly examples of ekphrasis; often as not, Freisinger only offers enough details about the painting in question to allow us to call up the rest of it in our memories. Instead, the paintings–whose titles are given to the poems they inspire–are more like jumping-off points for reflections, questions, even dramatizations.

In the poem “Freedom of Speech (1943),” for example, the speaker watches a man pausing

before one of Rockwell’s famous Four Freedoms,
the centerpiece, your rented headphones tell you,
of this retrospective for and about
the American people.

From there, the speaker proceeds not to admire the painting–with its famous image of an uneducated man standing to speak his piece at a town meeting–but instead to question its seeming simplicity, first by wondering about the man viewing it–

Or say his wife
has recently died. For him, then the painting
is less about speech than it is about grief,
about the way words have failed to convey
the pain in the swollen heart on his sleeve.

–then by worrying away at the very concept of free speech itself in a democracy that seems to rely ever more on force.

Or take “Rosie the Riveter (1943),” which puts the image in the fast-fading memory of a woman who was young when Rockwell’s painting appeared; for her, it brings memories of her husband’s death in the war, and of the

strange contrast
between the powder compact and lace hankie wedged
in one pocket and the phallic gun silenced for lunch.
All of it seemed to say that those at home were safe
from Hitler’s spreading sickness, that women were
permitted to be strong in the absence of men,
like Penelope with Odysseus away,
but they must never forget who they are
once wars are over.

It’s a way of accepting the power of Rockwell’s images without fully giving in to them–in a sense, rescuing them from the dulling accretions of decades of reproductions and manufactured nostalgia so we can look at them anew, read them afresh, from our later, one hopes more knowing, vantage.

The poems don’t always fully succeed: “After the Prom (1957)” comes close to succumbing to nostalgia, even if it’s nostalgia that acknowledges that the past never quite was the way we imagine we remember it. “The Problem We All Live With (1964)” never entirely overcomes the southern dialect in which it’s cast; dialect, especially in poetry, is incredibly hard to pull off. But on balance, these traditional, formal, thoughtful poems seem like just the right response to Rockwell–while it’s not impossible to imagine an avant-garde poetry that could be written in response to his work, it’s hard to imagine it not seeming off-kilter, unconvincing.

The stateliness and precision of Friesinger’s lines, and the movements of the mind behind them, make for a satisfying little book, and one that I hope Holart will follow: a series of collections built around paintings could be a lot of fun.