[In the following review, Kinzie expresses disappointment in the general quality of Sentences while praising several of the individual poems.]

The last poem in Howard Nemerov's new Sentences is called “Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry.” It is about rain gradually turning into snow, but still acting like rain (only somehow lighter and thicker), until—there is suddenly snow flying instead of rain falling. The poem rhymes as a quatrain and a couplet and is composed in Howard Nemerov's own pentameter, an organism we recognize by the off-handed inversions of sentence order that sound at once decorous and colloquial; by that studied freedom of address and careful familiarity with old puns (“clearly flew”); and by the chill, dry precision of analogy (“gradient … aslant … random”). To these idiosyncratic marks of character, Nemerov adds the unassuming realism of the plot: you recognize only much later the poet's providence in having put something dark, living, and winged into the background.

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Formally, the poem is masterful, reassuring in its regularities, disturbing in its hints of chaos—those twin impulses that make up at least the necessary conditions of great verse. In Nemerov's rhymed poems, there is more activity in the final feet than in his unrhymed; the hints of chaos in “Because You Asked …” are whispered by the rhyme-dissonances between “drizzle” (the end of the fifth-foot amphibrach) and “invisible” (whose four syllables make up the two regular iambs of the fourth and fifth feet, with no supernumerary unstressed syllable at the end). Although DRIZ- rhymes with -VIS-, and although both DRIZZLE and INVISIBLE have final Ls, these rhyming sounds fall in different metrical places. We swallow the last two syllables of INVISIBLE—naturally, because the main accent falls on -VIS-, and in Nemerov's lines, because we are half-consciously trying to make the metrically nonparallel words match.

This rhyming on words that are, so to speak, cross-woven metrically, and the swallowing of certain lines (which necessitates the elongation of others) are parts of a larger design in which are also woven sentence and pause. For as the words unfold forward within the abstract metrical frame, they also pick up unaligned threads of grammatical periods and endings, which then hitch back across those lines, and even back across whole stanzas. If the metaphor of fabric-weaving applies to the making of verses, we must imagine either the warp as regular and the shuttle as uneven, or the warp as erratic and the voice of the shuttle as constant. The process in either case must accommodate both glide and tug, both smooth progress and lurching regress. The subject of the sentence that forms the quatrain of Nemerov's poem is “Sparrows,” but the burden of the quatrain's theme is the “drizzle” that turns (for two-and-a-half lines) to “pieces of snow.” A further twist is that, while “drizzle” is technically in command of the syntax for only one-half line, it is still continuing to fall through the ensuing transformations.

Because poetry moves backwards and forwards at once, the bit of cloth you wind up with is irregular, full of holes, yet also peculiarly complete, like a cat's cradle held on one hand by an adult and on the other by a child. Even the “symmetry” of the Popean couplet depends on radical asymmetries in the puns and in their disposition among parts of speech and in non-matching metrical places. In Nemerov's poem the adjectives “aslant” and “slow” do not inhabit the same semantic realm; yet for the moment of their expression, they are parallel in their doubleness: both render both shape and speed. Indirectly, “silver aslant” shows us rain razoring down quickly, while “random, white, and slow” suggests how the snow is starting to coast lethargically, scoot sideways, move anyway but straight down.

Even so bald a device as the choice of poly- over monosyllabic words in a metrical line is an indispensable means of varying speed, sentence structure, and texture. Compare the second line, “That while you watched turned into pieces of snow,” with its commanding monosyllables, and the rhopalic series of polysyllables in the third line, “Riding a gradient invisible,” which is softer, more rapid (because of weak secondary stresses on the last two words), more abstract, and syntactically unfinished.

In support of diction, syntax, and meter, Nemerov also employs a hovering effect, based sometimes on ambiguity, and sometimes on error. For example, I might revise his final couplet to expose the grammatical clumsiness of the final line:

There came a moment when you scarcely knew.
And then instead of fell they clearly flew.

But in Nemerov's couplet, with its authoritative rhyme, the ungrammatical use of “fell” is largely concealed, perceived by us only as a dull after-throb. In addition to softening the awkwardness in the last line, Nemerov also invigorates the meanings in the penultimate. By using “that” instead of “when,” he divides the reference between time and quality: (1) There came a moment during which you could not tell which was which; (2) There came a moment that you couldn't tell about. Of course the poem is about not being able to pinpoint delicate change; but it is also about not being able to describe how something got itself changed from rain into snow, prose into poetry, while watcher and writer know very well what the final state has come to: “And then they clearly flew.”

What clearly flew? Clearly, the pieces of snow, now soft and crowded flakes. But in the poem's updrafts are also borne aloft those feeding sparrows—not literally, rather as part of the suggestive warrant for any kind of flight. In other words (the words of the title), so is the poem launched. Not going straight to its goal—not falling like rain—a poem imperceptibly thickens itself out of the visible stream of prose. It crosses a line, before which it was transparent, following which it is opaque, by being in lines, displaying the words it holds in common with prose so that these are increasingly bracketed, thereby more choice, but also more free.

That poetry holds words in common with prose is a truth for which Howard Nemerov gives especially profound warrant in his poetry (which now numbers roughly 600 pages). He is a master of blank verse in the brief lyric and the middle-length poem, and has molded the unrhymed iambic pentameter line into some of the subtlest formal bodies we have. His forbear in this is Frost, but Nemerov is less heavily stressed and less the rural poseur. Not that Nemerov lacks his poses; on the contrary, he can be most irritating in his roles as watcher-of-broad-casts, man-walking-dog, suburban-stroller, visitor-of-parks. He lets the bourgeois into his satiric poetry, but also in his lyrics, he lets in (in less censored or censorious fashion) the world of solitary privilege. The finest poem in Sentences, “By Al Lebowitz's Pool,” provides a protected bell jar for Nemerov's meditations on time, light, youth, distance, and correspondence. It is a superior poem, but also one that depends on our liking the moneyed reserve of the middle classes.

Al Lebowitz's pool, however, does not represent class so much as reflect season. The owner himself barely appears. The poet observes the untouchable and undesired daughters swerving like fish through the water, on which surface, on other days, float only beach balloons or a wasp. The summer wanes. The speaker usually has a drink in hand. Idly, the poet roves among these details, which seem to provide at last, in each of the poem's five sections, the hypnagogic abstraction necessary for elegy. After a late summer storm,

                                                  The banked furnace of the sun
With reliquary heat returns in splendor
Diminished some with time, but splendid still.
Beside the pool we drink, talk, and are still,
These times of kindness mortality allows.

In such seamless weavings of the poetic tradition with his own personal tone (“With reliquary heat,” “The banked furnace”), Nemerov proves that the line between poetry and prose must be crossed not only by the word but by the heart. He is a poet who, like all of us, lives in the prosaic; and he acknowledges it in order to mine it.

But in contrast to other masters of the typical like Frost, Auden, and Cunningham, Nemerov is not, even in his sublime poems, always able to decide what he should do with the prosaic side of feeling. His worldly poses are often double-jointed—excuses for personal pathos where we expect the satirist's probity. His jokes frequently protest their humor. Since his first poems, The Image and the Law (1947), his books have been marred by gnomes too glib and constructed to be true. He tries to be playful, but sounds grim. And when he wants that grimness to be prophetic, he sounds inward and crotchety. He wants to be “bitter” as Yeats was, but has not Yeats's stake in the culture (perhaps no American has this), nor Yeats's obsessive delusions. Nemerov's temperament and language are not suited to displays of saeva indignatio, although his temperament is also such as to think it is. I do not think we hear in Nemerov that harsh transport of which J. V. Cunningham wrote in 1947 when he characterized the poetic gift:

These the assizes: here the charge, denial,
Proof and disproof: the poem is the trial.
Experience is defendant, and the jury
Peers of tradition, and the judge is fury.

I suspect that Howard Nemerov desires to be viewed as a poet who can range, with indulgence, majesty, or fury, over a broad geography of subjects and moods. This is not the case. His best mood, the one that brings out the tenderest and most credible language, is that mood of pitying praise in the presence of natural law and intellectual construct. In another age, Nemerov would have been bard to the Royal Society or an enclave of Thomists. He was framed to celebrate the edifice of mind from a gargoyle's niche; he depends, that is, on a tradition of shared intellectual achievement to which he can pay orthogonal homage in the form of tears. For that is the heart of his lyricism: astrophysics, syllogism, fluid geometry, and Zeno's paradox fleshed, formal, and full of rue:

Intent upon the target eye
The arrow pierced a garden air
Fragrant with flowers yellow and blue,
It flew beside a shining hedge
And over cobwebs jeweled with dew,
It passed above a still black pool
With a fountain for a heart
Lifting its silver droplets up
So slowly (and the flight so swift)
They stood in air before they fell
Tap tap upon the dark dripstone.
Always, while burrowing in the brain,
Always, and while the victim fell,
The hastening arrow held that still
Moment along its shining shaft.
Its feathers whistled that still air.

In Zeno's World

This lovely lyric is written in the same loose tetrameters Nemerov used for “The Blue Swallows” in 1967, another poem about “finding again the world” by a conscious application of the mind's eye to what is (therefore) “intelligible.” In the protected garden of the mind, Nemerov has made a perfect gazebo.

In another poem, the cerebral and the emotional mingle with more homely point. A little aircraft is guided down by crossing needles, course, and height

Till finally it's funneled in and down
Over the beacons along a narrowing beam,
Perfectly trusting a wisdom not its own,
That breaking out of cloud it may be come
Back to this world and to be born again,
Into the valley of the flarepath, fallen home.

The Little Aircraft

The final consonants in these lines, from the m/n family, form a second kind of instrument panel, guiding the plane, by dark longing moans, down to its home.

During a solar eclipse, the poet considers how the life of one man may be charted even to its end against the rare punctuations by the moon's darkened disc across the second great wanderer among the worlds:

A man may see, as I have done, but four,
In childhood two, a third in youth, and this
In likelihood my last. We stand bemused
While grass and rock darken, and stillness grows,
Until the sun and moon slide out of phase
And light returns us to the common life
That is so long to do and so soon done.

During a Solar Eclipse

The final monosyllabic line is a tour de force of plain-style pathos. Monosyllables serve a different function in “Insomnia I,” that of blunt, noncommittal background for two more elaborate styles. If unable to sleep, you should, says Nemerov, go downstairs, have a bit to drink, read a mystery,

Then, when you know who done it, turn out the light,
And quietly in darkness, in moonlight, or snowlight
Reflective, listen to the whistling earth
In its backspin trajectory around the sun
That makes the planets sometimes retrograde
And brings the cold forgiveness of the dawn
Whose light extinguishes all stars but one.

Nemerov attaches a drag-line to the music of the spheres—the rationalist terminology of Miltonic syntax and Latinate jargon, a vocabulary cancelled by the glistening Anglo-Saxon gray of the phase “cold forgiveness of the dawn” and by the uncodifiable undersong of the “whistling earth.”

A final example of Nemerov's pathos-of-the-intellect, “The Makers.” The first poets, those nameless makers of the consciousness of interval, who made poetry and language possible, are those who felt (as immediately as the odor of a rose) that the ability to form and distinguish vowels and consonants was what made it possible to make metaphors.

They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

This is blank verse both cerebral and melodious, yet what moves us is not that balance, but the frailty of fame and the doomed circularity of poetic endeavor. The breathing shapes and stops, the vowels and consonants, are the foundations of shifting Babels whose magic is ephemeral. Like “The Makers,” all of Nemerov's best poems are strangely sad. Encumbered with habitual self, they rise to plateaus of nostalgic obedience to the world, on which a natural, rich simplicity is flexed by mutability:

… if these moments could not pass away
They could not be, all dapple and delight.

Sentences is a disappointing and self-indulgent volume on the whole, but has some landmark poems. In these serious poems, not only has Nemerov continued to accommodate himself to the literary tradition without falling back on parody; he has also in this handful of poems extended the resources of blank verse beyond what any modern practitioner, himself included, has managed to do. This extension comprises more than a mere prosodic advance; it is a rhetorical and imaginative advance. “By Al Lebowitz's Pool,” “The Makers,” “Monet,” and “A Christmas Storm,” for example, are dazzling in their very naturalness, especially when we take into account that the last two are single, elaborated sentences, each of which encourages all the digressive ribbons and falls of thought, as the poet draws them back into coherent movements of syntax and line. No one since Frost has done as much to move blank verse forward from where Wordsworth and Coleridge had left it. The long sentence that falls variously from clause to clause and line to line in the last verse paragraph of “By Al Lebowitz's Pool” reminds us of the feats of the Romantics, but on a scale at once more thematically restricted and more spiritually daring:

Enchanted afternoon, immune from time,
Illusion's privilege gives me the idea that I
Am not so much writing this verse as reading it
Up out of water and light and shadow and leaf
Doing the dance of their various dependencies—
As if I might daydream my way again
Into the world and be at one with it—
While the shadows of harder, more unyielding things
Edge steadily and stealthily around the pool
To translate the revolving of the world
About itself, the spinning ambit of the seasons
In the simple if adamant equation of time
Around the analemma of the sun.

This final verse paragraph, by turns reserved and gorgeous, yielding and severe, also convinces me that even a limitation, if acknowledged and persisted in, can approach transcendence.