TO LOOK AT ANYTHING

Roots, bark, branches, driftwood, flowers: Earl sees faces and creatures in them all, and Hopkins sets out to match each of his photos with a poem. Next to a segment of twisted wood that resembles a deer with horns he puts Lilian Moore's poem about confronting a deer, and facing another with elephant-like eye and trunk is Gwendolyn Brooks' ""Pete at the Zoo,"" musing about an elephant. No overall mood is set--the notion works best with spooky light verse such as Jack Prelutsky's ""The Troll"" and the anonymous Cornish ""Ghoulies and Ghosties,"" but Emily Dickinson's ""I'm Nobody"" and the gnarled, duck-billed configuration that faces it don't do much for each other; nor does the forked branch that resembles walking legs add to Dag Hammarskjold's ""Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the horizon will find his right road."" Of Hopkins' 23 selections, three, inevitably, are from Whitman, and three, less explicably, from Patricia Hubbell. The photos are sometimes clever, the pairings unevenly successful. Essentially a novelty.