The poems in Peter Gizzi’s “The Outernationale” (Wesleyan University Press, 111 pages, $22.95) bear a striking resemblance to the prose usually produced by academics: carefully controlled, well-composed and well-informed, and totally becalmed. (Mr. Gizzi, whose previous books include “Periplum” and “Some Values of Landscape and Weather,” teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.) Despite its sophomoric title, “The Outernationale” is not an amateurish or thoughtless book. Mr. Gizzi has a real affinity for the natural world and the human artifacts that litter it. Take, for example, “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures,” a poem examining the interior of a painting by Vincent van Gogh:

The light was my enemy and one great source of agony
One great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.
The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear
The gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun.

Or this, from “Untitled Amherst Specter:”

I have seen the long file of mule trains and metal
The cavalry
The sounds we live within speaking to you now
Sir I was a soldier in these woods.

These lines are evocative, if somewhat unspecific. But they capture the spirit of the best moments in “The Outernationale.” Mr. Gizzi possesses an expansive and slightly wistful visual sense, as well as a tendency to blur or elide details. And he is sensitive to the aesthetic and political past, although a bit uncertain about the meaning of its reoccurrence. The implied devastation in the background of “Untitled Amherst Specter” seems meant in some unclear way as a comment on the war-torn present; “Protest Song” — “This won’t help when the children are dying / no answer on the way to dust / Neither anthem to rally nor flag flutter / will bring back the dead, their ashes flying”—is a compact and striking but similarly murky effort.

Mr. Gizzi writes of a “bearded poplar / morphing in up-late celestial wonder,” of “pale grass in March / its salt hay blonde flourish.” The featureless speaker in these poems constantly appreciates the world of physical objects, and this enthusiasm, even in the book’s more somber moments, is hard to deny. To cite Mr. Gizzi once more: “O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing …”

A praiseworthy aim. And though the terms of this usefulness remain undefined, Mr. Gizzi’s keen sense of wonder must fulfill it at least partially. But “The Outernationale,” while gesturing toward philosophical and political struggle, remains nonetheless comfortably ensconced in this diaphanous rhetoric. This rhetoric shows up in the reprise of the title poem:

Trees migrate secretly upward.
They might be saying
all we need to be here
if we would only stop
talking and listen up.

This is as philosophically penetrating as “The Outernationale” gets. One is thankful that Mr. Gizzi reaches toward such ontological questions, but this gentle incuriosity gives one pause when it appears. And his pessimism is as jejune as his optimism:

The confusion of sex and death
of childhood and decay
of sideways glances and
dinnish noises
of all things dented
and almost destroyed
amidst the once of beauty…

As elegy, this is too mired in generalized statement to convince. But its lilting, almost pleasant rhythm makes it disturbingly difficult to distinguish from the more lighthearted moments in “Outernationale.” And its emptiness can be found even in Mr. Gizzi’s passionate attachment to the “actual seen thing,” the world of the senses.

Arnold Schoenberg once observed that the middle road is the only one that does not lead to Rome. Mr. Gizzi hews in this book to a safe, finally unobserved path of precisely the kind Schoenberg warned against. “The Outernationale” is a well-made, engaging book, but it is not a memorable one. And its admixture of a fluent and polished (not to say slick or mechanical) use of language with inner vacuity proves, sadly, that not even the best aesthetic intentions, not even a passionate desire to be “of use” to the world of experience, suffices on its own.

Mr. Munson reviews fiction and poetry for several publications.