[In the following review of A Howard Nemerov Reader, Anderson says that the volume points to Nemerov as a teacher and reiterates the poet's notion of the interplay of the mind with the universe.]

This fine, labyrinthine collection will delight readers who are familiar only with Howard Nemerov's poetry. Here we have his fiction, which allows him a much wider emotional and imaginative range than do his poems, and his essays, which reveal Mr. Nemerov as brilliantly incisive, if occasionally curmudgeonly. There is also a selection of his poetry from 1947 to the present, including some of his finest: “To Clio, Muse of History” and “The Mud Turtle.”

Perhaps the most prominent voice in A Howard Nemerov Reader is Nemerov as teacher, fiercely insisting that poetry is a thing like no other thing, an act of conjuration, a branch of magic by which the poet “hears [his] voice as that in which the wise might speak.” Mr. Nemerov suggests that poetry is a spiritual exercise “having for its chief object the discovery or invention of one's character.” He insists that poetry is not for everyone, even for some of those who presume to practice it. “If we do not have it, perhaps poetry is not for us; music goes on though many are tone-deaf” is a statement that offers a kind of cold comfort to those who feel that the capacity of human beings to understand and feel poetry is shrinking.

My favorite essay, “On Metaphor,” begins with an anecdote about the author trying to identify with certainty some purple finches that landed on his lawn. He takes down Peterson's “Field Guide” and, after reading an exacting, if prosaic, scientific description of the bird, comes to the line “a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.” He concludes: “Now I know that I am seeing purple finches.”

What is delightful about the prose in this volume is the spirit of playfulness and, in the essays, the undeniable, relentless love of poetry. There is never any doubt here that Howard Nemerov has earned the right to say, with Wallace Stevens, “The mind that in heaven created the earth and the mind that on earth created heaven were, as it happened, one.”