[In the following excerpted review of The Blue Swallows, Davison praises the clarity and philosophical sophistication of Nemerov's poems.]

The poems in Howard Nemerov's sixth collection, The Blue Swallows, seem to exhibit their grace under less pressure than is evident in the work of poets like Merwin and Dugan. If so, it may be a tribute to the poet for turning away the charge of events with a flick of the wrist, like a matador. These poems have a calm surface, whether they be witty glosses on the Great Society or somber riddles about man and nature and history. The surpassing virtue of Nemerov's poetry has always been clarity rather than passion. In this latest book he has begun to take on the apparently (but only apparently) easy movement that Robert Frost mastered, and to tackle philosophical problems as Frost did. Much of the most evocative of Nemerov's work has always taken place in the presence of water; for example, a poem which begins “I stand and watch for minutes by the pond / The snowflakes falling on the open water,” which moves on, in dialogue form, to speculate in expanding ripples about the Many and the One, in a manner not unlike Yeats's “Dialogue of Self and Soul.” These poems shine with wit, sing out with descriptive certainty (A mud turtle: “His lordly darkness decked in filth / Bearded with weed like a lady's favor …”), and explore the bewilderment of a mature and civilized man surveying the world without animus.