In Meville’s great novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab seeks news from Captain Gardiner, whose son has been lost after an encounter with the monstrous whale. Ahab’s refusal to help Gardiner find his boy is foreshadowed in Ahab’s behavior when the two captains first meet aboard the Pequod: “Immediately he was recognized by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.” Ahab’s refusal sweeps aside the rituals and courtesies of public discourse and the civilized life such social norms embody.

William Baer chose Melville’s “formal salutation,” not only as the epigraph to this book of measured verse but also, pluralized, as the book’s main title. That choice is complemented by the dust-jacket painting depicting a man and a woman in formal attire skillfully dancing. Lines from two poets come to mind and harmonize: W. B. Yeats’ “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?,” and Alexander Pope’s “True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.” Taken together, the epigraph, title, and cover art are a good introduction to Baer as a writer of traditional, accentual-syllabic poems.

Baer is a master of the sonnet and the ballad as well as of other forms. His poems are often character studies and frequently tell stories or recount “incidents,” as Baer has called them. Baer is also a fine translator. This collection includes his versions of poems by Catullus, Dante, Luís de Camões, Jorge Luis Borges, and others.

One series of poems entitled “Psalter” presents key episodes from the Bible; another, “Love Sonnets,” is a modern version of a Renaissance sonnet sequence. Yet others, including those in the series “The Unfortunates,” are about people who, through character flaws, zaniness, bad decisions, illusions, self-delusions, wrong desires, fate, or sheer bad luck, invite the reader’s sympathy, judgment, or both. These are often psychological and moral case histories full of ironic situations and chance encounters, with an occasional hint of the supernatural.

Among Baer’s most memorable portraits are those of fakers or con artists. The subject of “Confidence Man” has spent his life making money through fraudulent schemes. He even manages to con a judge and jury with false contrition and thus game a too sympathetic, liberal U.S. judicial system and receive a suspended sentence:

He loved this country—the land of marks and suckers,

with all its mushy laws, and covetousness,

its freedom to do most any damned thing under the sun,

and its judiciary con, where one, with certain skills, could scam the scam.

Such trickery is not only American: it is universal. In “The Artist of Fashion,” a modern avant-garde painter in Paris is exposed as someone who would “play the game till he got rich.”

It’s clear that Baer regards some modernist free verse as another kind of scam. In “The Poet Moderne,” he imagines the elderly expatriate Ezra Pound confessing that his life, his promotion of vers libre, and his epic The Cantos had all gone wrong: “He called his work a ‘botch,’ ‘not art,’/ lacking form, and lacking heart.” He continues his jibes at free verse in a hilarious parody of a western, “The Ballad Rode into Town,” which tells the story of a ballad personified as a knightly cowboy coming to rescue a fair maiden—a “lovely sonnet”—from the “free-verse rummies” in the saloon. In contrast, in “On His Blindness,” translated from Borges, Baer admires the Argentine poet’s heroic faithfulness to—and consolation in—his formalist verse, especially after the loss of his eyesight: “For others, there remains the universe,/ but in my penumbra, only the habits of verse.”

This devotion to craft is one of many kinds of love, and Baer explores other kinds of love in this volume, some good, some not. Baer translates the Paolo and Francesca episode from Dante’s Inferno, in which an affair begun while reading a book about the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere leads to the murder of the young lovers by Francesca’s husband and the damnation of all three to Hell. Then, in his translation of Borges’ sonnet “The Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three,” Baer depicts Odysseus realizing that mature love is better than all his adventures before his return to his rightful place: “And now, in the warm love of their bridal bed,/ the luminous queen lies sleeping with her head/ on the chest of her king.”

Baer describes yet even greater love, for another kind of king, in the poem “Egypt.” There, Joseph, on the flight into Egypt, worries for the safety of Mary and the Christ Child. But Mary knows a love beyond earthly trepidations. As Joseph says:

Still alert, I take a moment to pray,

then hear a certain threatening sound from the east;

the child stirs, but the noise then fades away.

It’s clear there’s no real danger, for now, at least,

as Mary smiles and sings to calm our fears

a song that seems the music of the spheres.

Such music of the spheres—also understood in ages past as a kind of dance—brings us back to the title of Baer’s collection, and to the painting of a well-dressed man and woman artfully dancing by the sea in rhythms that recall traditional measured verse. Their differences and similarities as male and female are like those of two words that rhyme, alike yet unlike, becoming one. These are the formalities, the “habits of verse,” that shape and define cultural norms and thereby civilized life. This is the civility which Captain Ahab had long abandoned when he ignored the custom of exchanging a “formal salutation” with Captain Gardiner and then, utterly lacking human sympathy and love, refused to help his fellow captain search for his lost child.

[Formal Salutations: New & Selected Poems by William Baer; Evansville, Ind.: Measure Press; 206 pp., $25.00]