This second poetry collection by Amy Newman, winner of the 1999 Beatrice Hawley Award, is aptly named. The title captures the precarious marriage and ongoing tension between objective detachment and rapture that underlies these poems. What are we to make of Newman's camera lyrica, an apparatus that utilizes rapture and enthusiasm to record its images? Is this not a device that belies its own authority?

Newman continually challenges the authority of the "camera" and the "eye" in this collection. In "Travel Diary," she writes, "the eye opens or the eye closes,/the irresponsible, servile eye." The eye of the historian and of the poet is fallible. It blinks when it should remain steady. It stares when it's impolite. It looks according to whim and bias at the particular when it should regard the whole. It neglects the details in the panorama. But the fault does not lie solely with the recorder. Language is a bestial, resistant, willful medium. "Into the alphabet of the eye/the howling wilderness of letters, characters in a tract,/digging in at the heels." Despite this difficulty, Newman displays her mastery over her medium time and again.

In the opening poem, "Representation," Newman skillfully balances the collective and the particular:

The rib cage scales biology and architecture,
music and form. One breath, and the breadth

of the human shifts, and then idea, and then
egress, and never mind the science of skin.

This science of skin soon becomes a scene of personal tragedy and remembrance:

But what manner of thought is this

for such a little girl? The kindergarten teacher had a son
who left the riding mower running when it got stuck

on a rock wedged too sure in the wheel. Then it kept mowing
once he removed it, too quick, a surprise.

Newman's camera quickly pans back, resisting the pathos of the scene. But Newman is not always so successful in maintaining the language of scientific detachment. For every moment that she displays her objective eye, she soon betrays her rapturous obsession with nature, technology, and humanity, and her love affair with language, despite its difficulties:

In the wasp's lineage from filament to airplane:
some grip of distance, some idea of thrust,

wicked thinness into the head wind,
hot little jaw and lifted shell ("The Vulnerable").

Newman's camera becomes even more focused in the book's second half. In Section I, she tackles panoramic issues of representation, realism, history, the ability or inability to say "This is what happened" or "This did not happen." In Section II, she zooms in to capture the interior of spaces, lingering on the lush, intimate particulars. For instance, in "Darwin's Unfinished Notes to Emma," she captures Darwin's mounting sexual frustration, during his separation from Emma. His rampant libido is thinly veiled in his observations on the processes of pollination. Speaking of the orchid's enticement of the wasp, he says:

She wears her color

like flesh, and scents brazenly
for him: spreading herself in the cooler air;

her sweet interior; the fumbling
of the dizzy wasp.

I want to say, Orpheus,
are you as bad as I hope? Could you

have maybe been playing your music
to me? I feel remote
as any island.

Now all's quiet with her, and the rhythm,
so helpful, her walk, as patent as toast,
let her down like her strings fell and she was
a marionette, weird puppet, spilled milk,

so nobody cry then, okay? Okay.