[In the following excerpted review, Hudson says that the poems in The Western Approaches continue to delight the reader.]

Howard Nemerov¹ goes on and on and on writing good poems; almost always in iambics, occasionally rhymed quatrains or sonnets but mostly blank verse. As yet another book comes out or an entire number of Poetry is devoted to him, I keep expecting to find that he is (like some I could name) writing too much. Not so. He seldom fails, he constantly delights, and I have asked myself what his secret is. It is not in the prosody. The versification, like the tone of discourse, is low-keyed, and strict count is maintained to a degree that even suggests incomplete confidence. I wish he would rumple his lines a little more. But he has exceptional qualities of mind and he is an interesting poet, alike through choice of subject and through exploitation of his subject, which process is, unlike his versification, brilliant, original, and full of surprises. Nemerov, and this is one of the themes of our day, explores the ordinary. “Late Late Show,” “Watching Football on TV,” “Waiting Rooms,” “Pockets”: the poems which go with those titles are about exactly what the titles say they are about; but in this unpromising material surprises are uncovered and displayed, as in the one about watching football:

We watch all afternoon, we are enthralled
To what? some drama of the body and
The intellectual soul? of strategy
In its rare triumphs and frequent pratfalls?
The lucid playbook in the memory
Wound up in a spaghetti of arms and legs
Waving above a clump of trunks and rumps
That slowly sorts itself out into men?
That happens many times. But now and then
The runner breaks into the clear and goes,
The calm parabola of a pass completes
Itself like destiny, giving delight
Not only at skill but also at the sight
Of men who imitate necessity
By more than meeting its immense demands.

In “Fiction.” “The people in the elevator all / Face front, they all keep still, they all / Look up with the rapt and stupid look of saints / In paintings at the numbers that light up / By turn and turn to tell them where they are.” In addition to those subjects which may appear uninteresting in themselves and unpromising for poetry, there are those which by their very obvious promise, and frequent use, inhibit originality: the seasons, the ocean, the trees. “The Measure of Poetry” begins with an altogether striking study, in prose (an essay rather than a prose poem) of the waves of the sea; though the application by analogy to poetry itself seems less successful. “First Snow” leads Nemerov into a vision of the world's great cities forever snowed under after the sun (“Being after all a mediocre star”) burns out. “Meanwhile, / It only hisses through the whitening grass, / And rattles among the few remaining leaves.” I do not know that the sound of snow has ever been so caught. Furthermore, first snow is something most of us notice every winter, without having it motivate the gigantic fantasy you will find if you read this poem.

Note

1. The Western Approaches, by Howard Nemerov. University of Chicago, $7.95.