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The phrase “pace and poise” seems to be a sort of idiom, albeit I can’t find any reference of it being one in the dictionaries I can avail myself of. I have come upon the phrase in the following passage taken from the New Yorker (emphasis added):

But something happens to the pace and the poise of “Django Unchained” as the hunters head South and the screen fills with the word “Mississippi.”

While I perfectly know the meaning of each word this phrase is constituted of, I think that there is something more to the mere addition of each meaning which I cannot grasp at the moment. Is this an idiom?

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It's not an "idiom". It's just that journalist taking advantage of the fact that this (or indeed, any) movie could be described as having the two (unconnected) attributes "pace" and "poise". And since the exact nature of those two attributes changes at one particular point in the movie, our journalist gets the chance to use a bit of alliterative wordplay. But in the final analysis this means very little, so I think the question is Too Localised. – FumbleFingers Feb 18 at 22:25
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It's not an idiom in the sense of a figure of speech that can't be understood compositionally, but the rhythm and alliteration does mean they get paired rather more than one might expect otherwise, and as such it could be so popular as to be an idiom in the vernacular sense of a common phrase. It's compositional though; it literally just means the pace of (in this case) the film and the poise of it. – Jon Hanna Feb 18 at 23:00
Thank you for your comments. I’m sorry to have posed a pointless question, but I googled this pair of adjectives and, given the occurrences, it seemed to me that it could be considered an idiom, in a sense. Thank you again. :-) – Giorgiomastrò Feb 18 at 23:40

closed as general reference by MετάEd, cornbread ninja 麵包忍者, Kristina Lopez, FumbleFingers, Jon Hanna Feb 18 at 22:58

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