The versatile American poet Howard Nemerov, has an extraordinarily varied body of excellent work to his credit. It ranges from light but telling satirical comment to the very serious, morbidly brilliant sequence ‘The Scales of the Eyes,’ and includes touching buffoonery such as ‘Lot Later’ (in which the biblical Lot tells his story in the language of a modern American-Jewish businessman) and the archaically elegant, eerie formality of ‘The Goose Fish.’ Sheer humane intelligence with a sharply ironic edge carries Nemerov a good distance, and ‘The Scales of the Eyes’ reveals a sensibility such as marks the best of the confessional poets—here turned away from the particular events that have scarred the poet's life to the symbolic dream-data of the inward life. Throughout the sequence, the speaker wrestles with the grossness of existence and with the inevitability of death and its omnipresence:

Around the city where I live
Dead men in their stone towns
Wait out the weather lying down. …

The terror of the poem seems in some degree a total retention of the first awareness and horror of death felt by children. Many of the specific memories the speaker calls upon in the course of the poem are of a comparable nature—unforgotten shocks and depressed responses of childhood. Thus, the opening of the fifth section, called ‘A Can of Dutch Cleanser’:

The blind maid shaking a stick,
Chasing dirt endlessly around
A yellow wall, was the very she
To violate my oldest nights;
I frighten of her still.

Birth-trauma, the ominousness of all things—snow, an empty house, the sea—viewed in certain moods: many of the notes of the poem are a reaching back toward childhood and even toward a pre-natal condition, as well as an opposing effort to grasp the actual feel and import of literal death. The acceptance of life in joy toward which the poem ultimately strives must wait upon the demanding discipline of these efforts and is well-earned when it comes through. In ‘The Scales of the Eyes’ and a few other poems, Nemerov holds his cleverness in check and discovers his deeper possibilities.

Nemerov is one of a number of poets whom we might call ‘independents,’ though the term would be something of a misnomer. It is easy enough to see their place in the whole modern picture; they are ‘independents’ in the sense that they have worked on their own, in the manner of many artists, without being closely involved with the momentary ‘centers’ of most intense poetic influence and perhaps without attracting much critical attention. …