In this paper, we explore the idea of using only pose, without utilizing any temporal information, for human action recognition. In contrast to the other studies using complex action representations, we propose a simple method, which relies on extracting "key poses" from action sequences. Our contribution is two-fold. Firstly, representing the pose in a frame as a collection of line-pairs, we propose a matching scheme between two frames to compute their similarity. Secondly, to extract "key poses" for each action, we present an algorithm, which selects the most representative and discriminative poses from a set of candidates. Our experimental results on KTH and Weizmann datasets have shown that pose information by itself is quite effective in grasping the nature of an action and sufficient to distinguish one from others. © 2010 IEEE.