The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov

by Howard Nemerov, Daniel Anderson (Contribution by), Wyatt Prunty (Contribution by), Daniel Anderson (Editor)

Overview

Howard Nemerov—poet laureate of the United States, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets—was one of the most prolific and significant American poets of the twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1991, he had published fourteen collections of poetry.

Judiciously selected and introduced by poet Daniel Anderson, The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov represents the broad spectrum of Nemerov’s virtues as a poet—his intelligence, his wit, his compassion, and his irreverence. It stands as the retrospective collection of the best of what Nemerov left behind, which is some of the finest poetry that the twentieth century produced.

“To keep his errors down to a minimum,” W. H. Auden wrote, “the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon a nd even, perhaps, hated by all others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”

Such are the readers to whom the poetry of Howard Nemerov might appeal. He distinguished himself on the landscape of American letters as a writer of great versatility. More than a decade after his death, that claim still holds true.

In this, the only edition of Nemerov’s work that surveys his entire poetic output, first-time readers of these poems will find an introduction to a truly remarkable creative mind. Longtime admirers of Nemerov will be reminded once again of his significance as a craftsman and philosopher, and as a poetic steward of the many ways in which we experience the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804010597
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	06/23/2003
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Howard Nemerov (1920–1991) grew up in New York City, earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, and flew combat missions for the Royal Canadian Air Force and the U.S. Army. He published novels, short stories, criticism, and poetry.

Author of January Rain, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and the collection of poetry Drunk in Sunlight, Daniel Anderson is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	ix
	Preface	xv
	Acknowledgments	xxi
	from The Image and the Law (1947)
	The Truth of the Matter	2
	Observation of October	4
	The Fortune Teller	5
	from Guide to the Ruins (1950)
	Guide to the Ruins	7
	Elegy of Last Resort	8
	from The Salt Garden (1955)
	The Winter Lightning	11
	Zalmoxis	13
	The Pond	14
	The Goose Fish	19
	The Snow Globe	21
	Central Park	22
	The Market-Place	23
	from Mirrors and Windows (1958)
	The Mirror	25
	Trees	26
	The Town Dump	27
	Storm Windows	30
	Shells	31
	The Statues in the Public Garden	33
	A Day on the Big Branch	35
	The Loon's Cry	39
	A Primer of the Daily Round	43
	Brainstorm	44
	Painting a Mountain Stream	46
	from New Poems (1960)
	Moment	49
	Runes	50
	Going Away	60
	The View from an Attic Window	62
	The Icehouse in Summer	65
	from The Next Room of the Dream (1962)
	To Clio, Muse of History	67
	A Spell before Winter	69
	Goldfish	70
	Blue Suburban	71
	Burning the Leaves	72
	Elegy for a Nature Poet	73
	From the Desk of the Laureate: For Immediate Release	75
	from The Blue Swallows (1967)
	Landscape with Figures	77
	The Human Condition	79
	Beyond the Pleasure Principle	80
	Christmas Morning	81
	The Blue Swallows	82
	The Mud Turtle	84
	Summer's Elegy	86
	For Robert Frost, in the Autumn, in Vermont	87
	Firelight in Sunlight	88
	from Gnomes and Occasions (1973)
	On Being a Member of the Jury for a Poetry Prize	91
	September, the First Day of School	92
	After Commencement	94
	On Being Asked for a Peace Poem	95
	To D--, Dead by Her Own Hand	97
	The Beautiful Lawn Sprinkler	98
	from The Western Approaches (1975)
	Einstein & Freud & Jack	100
	Wolves in the Zoo	102
	The Common Wisdom	103
	The Dependencies	104
	A Cabinet of Seeds Displayed	105
	Again	106
	Near the Old People's Home	107
	Conversing with Paradise	108
	An Ending	109
	from Sentences (1980)
	The Serial	111
	Manners	112
	Monet	113
	Acorn, Yom Kippur	114
	Morning Glory	115
	The Dying Garden	116
	A Christmas Storm	117
	Easter	119
	By Al Lebowitz's Pool	120
	Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry	125
	from Inside the Onion (1984)
	A Sprig of Dill	127
	Wintering	128
	Fish Swimming amid Falling Flowers	129
	The Air Force Museum at Dayton	131
	From War Stories (1987)
	On an Occasion of National Mourning	133
	Models	134
	Night Operations, Coastal Command RAF	136
	The War in the Air	137
	The Afterlife	138
	On Reading King Lear Again, 1984	139
	from Trying Conclusions (1991)
	To the Congress of the United States, Entering Its Third Century	141
	Answering Back	143
	Larkin	144
	The Forbidden City	146
	The End of the Opera	147
	Trying Conclusions	148
	Index of Titles and First Lines	149

Editorial Reviews

More than a decade after his death, this book is intended to represent the range of Howard Nemerov’s virtues as a poet-his wry wit, his attentive eye, his capacity for marking ‘the before unapprehended relations of things.’ In this collection also are some of the most resonant and authoritative iambic lines written in American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.”—Daniel Anderson


“What the reader will find here is a struggle in which the aesthetic triumph of Nemerov's poetry renames and thus reorders the threats of scientific materialism and a century of unprecedented violence. The drama here is nothing less than that of the human spirit pitted against human experience.”—Wyatt Prunty


“Will help readers get beyond the seeming congenital bitterness, beyond the glow of collegial reminiscence, to a rrive at Nemerov's true virtues as a poet.”—The New York Times


“It is the prompting of a passionate intellect that leads him to write, the drive of a mind devoted to a set of ideas both irreducible and endlessly applicable.”—Robert B. Shaw, The Nation

From the Publisher

… more than a decade after his death, this "selected" volume of his work has arrived, and it will help readers get beyond the seemingly congenital bitterness, beyond the glow of collegial reminiscence, to arrive at Nemerov's true virtues as a poet. … [Nemerov] once complained to an aspiring Nemerovian that "nobody seems to have much to say about what I write. They either dislike it rather harshly, or say it's underrated and very fine." Nemerov's best poems are just that, very fine, without possessing a cultivated cogency of poetic practice to better push them on new readers. — Stephen Metcalf

The New York Times