[In the following excerpt from a review of The Blue Swallows and Josephine Miles's Kinds of Affection, Carruth, a prominent literary critic, writes that Nemerov's use of irony and poetic conventions makes the poetry seem “tired.”]

[Nemerov] belongs to the Eastern tradition, the tradition dominated first by Eliot and later by the poets associated with John Crowe Ransom. And their hallmark was “poetic irony.” One may search Nemerov's work up and down—his new book of poems [The Blue Swallows] being his sixth in 20 years—and find scarcely a statement that means what it says. Everything is wried away from literalness by the intrusion of the poet's ironic view. The ironic method is double-entendre; but when it is used too much, double-meaning slides over again into single-meaning; the literal meaning decays until it falls into meaninglessness, while the emphasis shifts entirely to the unspoken ironic meaning; and thus the poem is left at odds with itself.

Nemerov's relationship to his poem is consistently one of distance, doubt, distrust. In an age committed to commitment he is unable, apparently, to write a committed line. Yet at the same time his ironic detachment fails to attain for him what it is traditionally supposed to attain, the superiority of uncommitted moral purity, because in our age no such thing exists, as Nemerov himself says again and again.

No one would deny that famous and marvelous poems have been written in the manner of poetic irony. Nemerov, too, in his early work turned out several notable anthology pieces which are justly popular. But today this manner is an exceedingly tired manner, betraying an exceedingly tired poetic attitude. Without aspersion, one states this nevertheless bluntly, as an unavoidable judgment. And Nemerov's tired attitude is revealed in tired poetry: spent meters, predictable rhymes, and metaphors haggard with use. Consequently, even though Nemerov is more far-ranging and out-looking than [Josephine] Miles, even though his work is broadly circumspective of our bourgeois world, institutions, people and landscapes—one might call it the poetry of the sub-urbane—he fails to give us even the moderate vigor we find in her more direct approach.

There is one exception to this, Nemerov's light verse. Here his irony, motivated by political disgust, rises into outright sarcasm, funny and to-the-point; directness is restored. We read it with pleasure, not to say relief. But unfortunately the light verse is meager in proportion to the whole, only two or three poems in his new book properly qualifying. One wishes there were more.