[In the following excerpted review of The Western Approaches, Thomas finds the poems somewhat world-weary and the metrical patterns repetitive.]

America's troubles and introspections shadow [some recent] books. In Howard Nemerov's case, they help to create a tone of sadness, irony and ennui.

The physical law of entropy and two images, sea and tree, are the polarities of Nemerov's The Western Approaches. Entropy does its work in wearing down America to a land of the middle-aged middle-class watching the “coloured shadows” of football games; wearing down the music of the spheres to pedestrian prose; the lead of the artist's pencil; the onset of autumn and age. Against this depressing and universal decline, the sea, which is “a little more mysterious than that”, and the tree, in the Yeatsian sense of great-rooted blossomer, provide consolation.

As one expects from Mr Nemerov, there is an abundance of speculative intelligence, wit and elegance. It is hard to resist the pleasure of such lines as these, from “Late Summer”:

So secretly next year secretes itself
Within this one, as far on forested
                                                                                                    slopes
The trees continue quietly making
                                                                                                    news,
Enciphering in their potencies of
                                                                                                    pulp
The matrix of much that hasn't
                                                            happened yet.

Nevertheless, two aspects of this collection make it equally hard to give full-hearted consent to it as a whole. The play of finely expressed ideas seems to mask a rather weary withdrawal from the play of life. There is a sense in which the poems would prefer not to be about anything external to the mind. It may be significant that a large part of the book consists of poems—good poems—about art: painting, poetry, translation, novel-writing and, especially, music. Is this another entropy—art turning from the world to study its own image?

In a highly polished style, flaws tend to stand out glaringly. Mr Nemerov's constant iambic pentameter sometimes becomes a straitjacket, imposing on content rather than expressing it. For example, in “Watching Football on TV”, his description of footballers moving the viewers to “Lost nostalgic visions of themselves / As in an earlier, other world where grim / Fate” is overcome, contains at least three stale and superfluous adjectives, imposed by the metre. Nor does his metre spring off the tongue with that “sound of sense” of Robert Frost's authentic speechrhythms, though it appears to be trying to do so. There are seventy poems in The Western Approaches, written between 1973 and 1975. Nemerov is a distinguished poet; his distinction is clear in this volume; but even Yeats and Frost usually waited much longer than two years for a collection to distil.