It's a bad word, perhaps, but Howard Nemerov is really a philosopher. And judging from the scant space allotted him in the latest books on modern poetry, he is still one of our most underrated poets, despite a steadily widening audience (his New & Selected Poems, for example, is in its fourth printing). His latest book confirms what really has been evident since 1955 and The Salt Garden, more than any other contemporary poet, Nemerov speaks to the existential, science-oriented (or -displaced), liberal mind of the 20th century.

The Blue Swallows, published exactly 20 years after his first book, is Nemerov's seventh book of poetry, and the 67 new poems it contains represent not so much a culmination of his efforts as another step along a clearly defined technical evolution, and another elucidation (another series of examples) of what might be called a philosophy of minimal affirmation. Like his gulls and swallows, Nemerov circles around and around the things of this world, finding them insubstantial, frightening, illusory, beautiful, and strange. Nowhere is his basically pessimistic view of man as both hopeless and indomitable better expressed than in the conclusion of his new poem, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle":

There, toward the end, when the left-handed wish
Is satisfied as it is given up, when the hero
Endures his cancer and more obstinately than ever
Grins at the consolations of religion as at a child's
Frightened pretensions, and when his great courage
Becomes a wish to die, there appears, so obscurely,
Pathetically, out of the wounded torment and the play,
A something primitive and appealing, and still dangerous,
That crawls on bleeding hands and knees over the floor
Toward him, and whispers as if to confess: again, again.

In Nemerov's first two books, The Image and the Law (1947) and Guide to the Ruins (1950), the same pessimism is evident, but without the technical control, the assimilation of influences. In these early books Nemerov, an ex-RAF pilot, is "writing the war out of his system," as they say; he is also, more importantly, writing A) Eliot, B) Yeats, and C) Stevens out of his system:

The early poems in general have an abstract, literary quality, an esoteric vocabulary, many allusions. One marked tendency in Nemerov's technical development has been a growing simplicity and directness, not toward the "country" simplicity of Robert Frost, but the simplicity of a highly educated man trying to convey the substance of his meditations clearly.

Critics often note in his earlier work the influence of Auden. While one can find it in an occasional flatness of tone, Nemerov's wit is his own. (In the same way his novels have been compared to Evelyn Waugh's, but both of these similarities are only real insofar as wit is similar to wit.) Wit is certainly a constant element in Nemerov's work: puns, irony, satire, epigrams, jokes; these are not extrusive from his main body of poetry, but integral to it. Nemerov has said, "The serious and the funny are one." This is even more true of The Blue Swallows than of his earlier books.

The other main element besides wit that is carried over from his early poetry is a concern with theological questions, reflected often in Biblical subject matter (e.g., his two verse plays, "Cain" and "Endor"), but more often in a running dialogue with Christianity. Nemerov's own religious position seems to be that of a non-practicing Jew who is constantly wrestling with the problem of faith. An early sonnet ends: "The question is of science not to doubt / The point of faith is that you sweat it out." This is still an important theme in his latest book (e.g., "Creation of Anguish," "Cybernetics").

It was in his third book, The Salt Garden, that Nemerov first pulled together his talent and intelligence; originally a "city" poet, Nemerov moved to Bennington, Vermont, in 1948; and nature has been a unifying element in his work since The Salt Garden (in 1967 he was given the $1000 St. Botolph Club Arts Award for "a poet of accomplishment and promise, native to, or primarily associated with, New England). "The Goose Fish," "The Pond," "I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee," "The Salt Garden," are just a few of the poems from The Salt Garden which have become familiar to readers of contemporary poetry.

Also in The Salt Garden the two main influences on Nemerov emerge. His subjects and the flexible rhythms of his meditative blank verse reflect a close study of Wordsworth and Frost: he is one of the few poets to really learn from these masters:

Line, leaf, and light; darkness invades our day;
No meaning in it, but indifference
Which does not flatter with profundity.
Nor is it drama. Even the giant oak,
Stricken a hundred years ago or yesterday,
Has not found room to fall as heroes should …

The typical adjective used to describe nature is "brutal," and the link between brutal nature and "decent" bumbling man is found in the liquids, ocean and blood, which fuse into man's "salt dream," the submerged and subconscious call of the wild. And while Nemerov's lyrical intelligent voice brooding over nature and man dominates this book, there is also great variety of tone and subject: e.g., the telescoped images of "I Only Have Escaped Alone to Tell Thee," the surreal dream sequence "The Scales of the Eyes."

The trend toward nature begun in The Salt Garden continues in Mirrors & Windows (1958), the difference being that in the latter book Nemerov is consciously aware that he is a poet looking at nature, trying to capture it in his poems: "Study this rhythm, not this thing. / The brush's tip streams from the wrist / of a living man, a dying man. / The running water is the wrist."

"A Day on the Big Branch" is a good example of Nemerov's attitude, which might be called realistic romanticism. That is, the poems seem to be composed by a romantic sensibility which is at the same time too analytical and honest to see things other than as they are. Nemerov's rocks are "hard as rocks" and when the half-drunk card players climb into the wilderness nothing very glorious happens—except that as they talk of the war and of life, the majestic beauty of nature forces them into "poetry and truth":

so that at last one said, "I shall play cards
until the day I die," and another said,
"in bourbon whiskey are all the vitamins
and minerals needed to sustain man's life,"
and still another, "I shall live on smoke
until my spirit has been cured of flesh."

Another outstanding poem of minimal affirmation is "The Town Dump," a savage metaphor for civilization (in Nemerov's novels the pessimism is redeemed by the humor; generally speaking, in Nemerov's poetry the pessimism is redeemed by beauty, often symbolized by birds):

…. You may sum up
The results, if you want results. But I will add
That wild birds, drawn to the carrion and flies,
Assemble in some numbers here, their wings
Shining with light, their flight enviably free,
Their music marvelous, though sad, and strange.

Mirrors & Windows often reminds one of Hart Crane's lines which Nemerov used as an epigraph for his novel, Federigo: "As silent as a mirror is believed / Realities plunge in silence by …" The object of poetry is to catch as in a mirror the beauty and terror of life, not to make life prettier, not to make it easier for us, not even to help us understand it. "Some shapes cannot be seen in a glass, / those are the ones the heart breaks at." The poems in this book are life-reflecting mirrors, and windows through which we see with the poet's "infinitely penetrant" eye. Nemerov's poetry has become considerably more visual:

It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls
enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone,

or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges
the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light,
and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor,
blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam
of crystal to a calm where the waterlight
dappled the ledges as they leaned
against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered
and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again
against the low wind moving over the stream,
and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings.

New & Selected Poems (1960) contains only fifteen new poems; the new note is an overriding concern with his "deare times waste." Time and the loss of innocence, of friends, of hope, are the themes: "I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful," he writes, and the beauty teaches him to "endure and grow." The central poem—Nemerov's longest—is "Runes," symmetrically consisting of fifteen-line stanzas (a stanza form very suitable to his talent, e.g., "The Beekeeper Speaks" in The Blue Swallows). Like "The Scales of the Eyes," "Runes" is a sort of dream sequence, but more tightly organized, the fifteen stanzas being meditations clustered around the images of water and seed, "Where time to come has tensed / Itself." The smooth run-on blank verse lines match rhythm and content:

Consider how the seed lost by a bird
Will harbor in its branches most remote
Descendants of the bird; while everywhere
And unobserved, the soft green stalks and tubes
Of water are hardening into wood, whose hide,
Gnarled, knotted, flowing, and its hidden grain,
Remember how the water is streaming still.
Now does the seed asleep, as in a dream
Where time is compacted under pressures of
Another order, crack open like stone
From whose division pours a stream, between
The raindrop and the sea, running in one
Direction, down, and gathering in its course
That bitter salt which spices us the food
We sweat for, and the blood and tears we shed.

The water streaming in the seed streams through our world, our bodies, holding everything together in its always-changing permanence. The subtle rhythms support the imagery in a fusion of form and content; run-ons, alliteration, repetition, all playing important roles in the structure. The "s" sound in "soft green stalks and tubes," the "d" sound in "hardening into wood, whose hide, / Gnarled, knotted" reinforce the meaning; the rhythm, stopped by "whose hide, / Gnarled, knotted," flows forward again with "Flowing, and its hidden grain." The end of the first sentence holds the paradox of permanent impermanence in the ambiguous "streaming still." The onomatopoeic "crack" splits the second sentence, whose alliteration and longer phrases ("gathering in its course / That bigger salt which spices us the food / We sweat for") underline the stanza's conclusion.

Nemerov's sixth book of poems, The Next Room of the Dream (1962), continues his trend toward a more simple and clear verse, emphasizing natural description: "Now I can see certain simplicities / In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time, / And say over the certain simplicities, / The running water and the standing stone … " And yet, as he writes in another poem, "Nothing will yield": art smashes on the rocks of reality. Often attacked for being too "cold" or "cerebral," Nemerov's poetry is actually quite the opposite: a passion disciplined, but passionate and humanitarian nevertheless, with cries of anguish constantly breaking through: "—Nothing can stand it!" Poems like "Lion & Honeycomb" and "Vermeer" express his ars poetica, his striving for rhythms "Perfected and casual as to a child's eye / Soap bubbles are, and skipping stones"; poems like "The Iron Characters" and "Somewhere" express his humanitarianism; poems like "To Clio, Muse of History" and "The Dial Tone" are metaphysical expressions of his belief in the unreality of reality, the reality of the void.

The Blue Swallows is a worthy successor to these books. Divided into four sections, it has the variety, wit, and technical skill we have come to expect; it is also full of wisdom and gentleness:

… even the water
Flowing away beneath those birds
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
And the eyes that see become as stones
Whence never tears shall fall again.

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind's eye lit the sun.

While the themes and images are often specifically contemporary (Auschwitz, burning monks, a Negro cemetery, cybernetics), Nemerov is mainly concerned with finding timeless metaphors for the human condition, "relation's spindrift web." In poem after poem we are likened (without his saying so explicitly) to cherries picked off trees, snowflakes falling in black water, lobsters waiting in a tank, days falling into darkness, planted rows dwindling to wilderness, fields becoming shadow. These poems are used more or less contrapuntally with tremendously effective satire on The Great Society ("Money," "On the Platform," "To the Governor & Legislature of Massachusetts"). A typical example (not best, but chosen for brevity) is "Keeping Informed in D.C.":

Nature, still treated unromantically, permeates these poems; in "The Companions," which is a sort of modern "Immortality Ode," Nemerov describes the pull towards nature that, for example, Frost writes about in "Directive." But Nemerov refuses to see "messages" there: "That's but interpretation, the deep folly of man / To think that things can squeak at him more than things can." A fascination with light, "Firelight in sunlight, silver pale," also plays over these pages, and indeed these poems can be thought of as the "small flames" which conclude the book's final poem:

So warm, so clear at the line of corded velvet
The marvelous flesh, its faster rise and fall,
Sigh in the throat, the mouth fallen open,
The knees fallen open, the heavy flag of the skirt
Urgently gathered together, quick, so quick,
Black lacquer, bronze, blue velvet, gleam
Of pewter in a tarnishing light, the book
Of the body lying open at the last leaf,
Where the spirit and the bride say, Come,
As from deep mirrors on the hinted wall
Beyond these shadows, a small flame sprouts.

One reason that Nemerov speaks to this age is that his poetry attempts to come to terms with science: not just psychology (in which Nemerov is well versed, vide his Journal of the Fictive Life), but "hard" science. Light years and nebulae, the speed of light, electrodes, a heterodyne hum, physicists and particles, are typical subjects for him. His general position seems to be that science is "true," but never quite accounts for our lives (though it tries): science lacks "blood" and "mystery;" it misses the essential:

For "nothing in the universe can travel at the speed
Of light," they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

While Nemerov's typical form is the loose blank verse line, in The Blue Swallows he uses more short-lined poems, trimeter and dimeter, than in his earlier work, keeping with his trend toward simplicity. In this form, too, his rhythms are varied and subtle, as in the first stanza of "Celestial Globe":

This is the world
Without the world.
I hold it in my hand
A hollow sphere
Of childlike blue
With magnitudes of stars.
There in its utter dark
The singing planets go,
And the sun, great source,
Is blazing forth his fires
Over the many-oceaned
And river-shining earth
Whereon I stand
Balancing the ball
Upon my hand.

To sum up. The Blue Swallows is the work of a poet who is a master of his craft; rhythm, image, sound fuse in poem after poem. And the poetry speaks to us, as poems should. There is no certainty, much agony, our minds bow down "Among the shadows / Of shadowy things, / Itself a shadow / Less sure than they." Nemerov's general intelligence and craftsmanship perhaps seem old-fashioned today, when blood-and-guts, a confessional softness, and a sort of sloppiness are thought to be more "honest" or "spontaneous"; he is perhaps closer in spirit to, say, Pope, who is also out of favor (nevertheless the 18th century is called the Age of Pope). And underneath the darkness Nemerov continally strikes the existential spark, as in the conclusion of his poem describing an oil slick polluting a stream:

The curve and glitter of it as it goes
The maze of its pursuit, reflect the water
In agony under the alien, brilliant skin
It struggles to throw off and finally does
Throw off, on its frivolous purgatorial fall
Down to the sea and away, dancing and singing
Perpetual intercession for this filth—
Leaping and dancing and singing, forgiving everything.