[In the following review of Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics, the critic notes that Nemerov is good at debunking what he considers ridiculous and at writing effectively in several styles of discourse.]

Nemerov likes to wait in the grass for somebody to be stupid, then jump on him. He has been jumping now for more than 30 years and through a dozen or more books, and in this latest volume [Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics], a collection of miscellaneous lectures and reviews, he has a number of worthy targets. He jumps, for example, on the “and” in the title of a poetry bash he attended, “Poetry and the National Conscience,” by pointing out that the “and” confers “existence on whatever things stand to either side of it,” so that poetry, which under other circumstances might be found impossible to define, and the national conscience, which under other circumstances might be found nonexistent, are suddenly admitted as solid citizens.

Other targets: computer poetry; an anthology of “naked poetry”; complaints about the difficulty of modern poetry; questionnaires (including one of his own); extravagant reviews of slim volumes of verse; and bits and pieces of political sagacity, such as President Eisenhower's “things are more like they are now than they've ever been before.”

The lengthiest pieces in the volume are not, however, essentially rejoinders but meditations, mostly upon the nature of imagination. Nemerov moves gracefully in and out of several worlds of discourse—esthetics, psychoanalysis, even physics—and thereby does honor to the English Department world he inhabits, where too often an assortment of narrow views of the life of poetry prevails, unquestioned.