So many of Paula Rego’s paintings are of people caught in the act – but the acts are often ambiguous and the stories that surround them enigmatic. Do we want these incomparable paintings demystified and extended as narratives? The danger is that a poem will be attached to a painting like an artificial limb that readers will immediately want to reject.

Owen Lowery is the author of a praised debut, Otherwise Unchanged, that reflects on a life that did change when his career as a British judo champion ended after a severe spinal injury. He is a respectful, questing, mannerly writer, aware of the possible liberty of writing about Rego’s paintings and the complication that many are inspired by existing narratives (Jane Eyre, Snow White, the Bible), by paintings (Hogarth’s sequence Marriage à-la-mode) and a poem (Moth by Blake Morrison).

There is no shortage of poets who have written about paintings taking a lead – Auden on Brueghel, Heaney on Titian, Elizabeth Jennings on Rembrandt. And there was the wonderful Give Me Your Hand, in which Paul Durcan had a field day in London’s National Gallery. Unlike Durcan, Lowery is no entertainer. He is laboriously eloquent and misses the black humour in Rego’s work. Yet while I cannot pretend to recognise his Rego, his provocative enterprise is to be prized because it makes you look at the paintings (reproduced opposite the poems) with fresh attention.

The poems work as an unusual form of art criticism, redirecting our focus. Take his homing in on hands: “The composure of hands holding a prayer” (Perch) or the “dovetailing hands” (Time – Past and Present.) One is grateful to be made precisely aware, in Girl Lifting Up Her Skirt to a Dog, of sunlight as painter: “She lifts/the hem, catches the sun on blue and gold/ hoops, the backs of her hands and arms.” He makes one consider feet too (most commonly bare, occasionally aggressively shod), and “toes like ice against the tiles.” (The Psychiatrist). We scrutinise Rego’s masculine women, muscular even in surrender. Lowery is precise about her unsettling but not unsettled sleepers, describing the “scent in the jacket/ pressed by her right hip” (Sleeper) or the unquiet woman “Resting her head/ on a poncho” in The First Mass in Brazil, or supine Snow White’s apple-drugged swoon: “She’ll be cooling now, her heart/ clenching like a stone.” Rego does reverie like no one else: the waker who is asleep, the sleeper whose inner life can only be guessed at.

Lowery sees lifetimes in moments, has a far-sightedness that takes each figure beyond his or her (usually her) frame. He plays for time and a bigger cast. Whenever he sees fit, he adds men into the narrative for extra flavour.

In Mr Rochester, inspired by Rego’s lithograph of the same name, this is not necessary. Rochester frowns at us from the saddle. His horse looks as though he knows too much. Lowery ambitiously embraces Charlotte Brontë’s novel and convincingly implies that there is something weirdly seductive about Rochester’s irritable stare, although “his anger’s elastic/ submission” is a curious phrase. Perhaps it is that elastic can spring unpredictably, and so can this Rochester. I like “his top-hat’s coal-seam” but not the anachronistic “gears” and “scenario”.

The difficulty with this interesting book is that the reaching back and forth in time fails to liberate these paintings as works of art because, with Rego, the moment is all, the not knowing has value, there is rich torment in the freezing of time, in immobility and muteness, in everything her figures might but cannot say.

• Rego Retold: Poems in Response to Works by Paula Rego is published by Carcanet, £12.99. Click here to order it for £10.39

Mr Rochester

by Owen Lowery

A forthcoming, from its pool of shadows up
by angles of covered bone, to her knowing
it would happen on a day like this, the supple

terror of a horse’s eye holding her. She slows
to the scream of being locked in the Red Room
with its reek of dying flowers, throwing

herself at the door with horror assuming
form behind her. Or not her recent uncle
at all, but the girl from school she warmed the tomb

for in the morning, she lay beside for as long
as it took for her to fade. The dark mass
of a horse balances and shies, hung

both with reins and their froth, sees her dazzled
to a stand-off. It’s the gloom’s rider who’ll crack
the silence first with his anger’s elastic

submission. To which she’ll fling a coolness back
at least as soft and hard as his, then hear him
sliding towards the relative distraction

of another scenario they’ll have shared
by the time they reach their destination, paths
leading to Thornfield Hall. It’s easy once the gears

click them more alive than standing for the halves
of the same mountain. He, in particular,
fixed to his finding her an evening after

she dreamt him there, looking down fro the flicker
of a blasted tree, from his top-hat’s coal-seam
and answer in his boots, his whip-hand’s friction.