[In the following review, Pratt praises Nemerov's last volume of poetry and his mastery of his craft.]

Howard Nemerov personally selected the contents of his fourteenth and final volume of poetry, Trying Conclusions, including over a hundred poems from earlier collections published during a career of thirty years, along with twenty-four new poems written during the period 1988-91, the last three years of his life—two of them as poet laureate of the United States. It was a distinguished career, and readers now have the opportunity of appraising Nemerov's work as a whole, keeping in mind what he said of himself: that he could not make a living writing poetry but that he could make a good living writing about writing poetry.

The poetry he wrote justified the career, since it was always intelligent, deft, understated, ironic—the period modern style learned from masters like Auden and Ransom and Eliot before him. He did not, like his contemporaries Robert Lowell and John Berryman, create a distinctive style of his own, but to his credit he never became as confessional in his poetry as they did. His most confessional poem was the early “Debate with the Rabbi,” where he rejected his Jewish heritage once and for all: “You've lost your religion, the Rabbi said. / It wasn't much to keep, said I.” In fact, Nemerov rejected all religions and, following the example of Wallace Stevens, joked quietly about God in “Sunday”: “The odds are six to one He's gone away; / It's why there's so much praying on this day.” Quiet mockery was Nemerov's trademark: he did make a good living as a college professor, but, true to type, he wrote a poem poking fun at “a full professor” who “publishes and perishes at once.”

Just as there is constant mockery, there is formal control in every line of a Nemerov poem. The metrical regularity varies only slightly from blank verse to rhymed lyric—with one exception, a prose poem called “The Thought of Trees,” which startles the reader about midway through the collection, but only by its form, not its content; for it proves to be as knowing about nature as it is about man, and knowingness forecloses wonder again and again in Nemerov's poetry. As he says in a later poem, “Drawing Lessons”: “We see that repetition makes the world / The way it is, Nature repeats herself / Indefinitely in every kind.” If nature repeats herself, of course the poet is justified in repeating himself too, but can repetition account for the endless creativity of nature or of the best poets? No, and it is here that Nemerov, for all his wit and verbal skill, shows his limitations. When Rilke asked, “Tell us, poet, what you do?” he answered, “I praise,” but Nemerov never praised; rather, in “Walking the Dog” he declared, “just to show who's master I write the poem.”

The hand of the master is certainly there in every poem; what is not there is the sense of awe, of revelation, “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits,” as Pound once said, which is the feeling great poetry gives us. Nemerov, then, was not a great poet? No, but he was a very good one, and his final collection tells us that perhaps it was all he ever wanted to be.