Nemerov's Gnomic Conclusions

...Fresh implications and shadings jump off a page regarded posthumously, while some of the themes and characteristics that seemed notable in m?©dias res fade into insubstantiality...

...and distant Denmark/Where Hamlet and the others used to live...

...Trying Conclusions allows us to appraise Nemerov more clearly than ever before, not only because it marks the closure of his long career, but because it contains the finest examples of the late work...

...His high visibility in 1963 as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress probably helped to promote the popular impression of him...

...But to read Nemerov in this way ignores the intellectual complexity of the very un-Frostian poems, including "To Clio, Muse of History," "The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House," and "Gnomic Variations for Kenneth Burke...

...The Makers" revealed Nemerov as a magician powerful enough to invoke "the first poets,/The great ones, greater even than Orpheus...

...humorous little squibs he called "gnomes...

...Admirers have dutifully praised his clarity of thought, his philosophical cast of mind, his ability to convey feeling without falling into bathos...

...Reading these works, moreover, one realizes how many of today's younger poets have internalized aspects of his voice...

...He did compose several "goodbyes" before cancer took him last July at age 71...

...Mocking the "priestly" voice he sometimes affects in his serious poems, Nemerov closes with the dismissal of the traditional Latin Mass, ite, missa est...

...tone paintings ("Somber November in amber and umber embering out...

...Past misreadings of him as a primarily cerebral figure or the folksy "Son of Frost" cannot endure the book's witness...

...and lethal jabs at cultural sacred cows like Santa Claus and "classic" cars...

...Most of these are represented in Trying Conclusions (which stands as a supplementtohis 1977 Collected Poems...

...they merely assert the superiority of one kind of poetry over another...

...His books, from The Image and theLaw (1947) to the penultimate War Stories ( 1987), contain a bewildering m?©lange of poetic types: lengthy philosophical musings on nature, language and human life...

...As a poet Nemerov tended to perplex critics...

...The question was resolved, I believe, by the strong sequence about his trials as an RAF pilot during World War II, published in War Stories and reprinted in Trying Conclusions...

...they suspected some vital passion was being repressed or withheld much of the time...

...In "The End of the Opera," though, his emotions are more direct as he describes the transitional point in the theater when the artificial stage plot gives way to the curtain call...

...The best of them have a compart energy and a fierce compassion unique in the body of his work...

...Detractors have called him "lofty," "disengaged," andflung that ultimate invective of the 1960s and '70s, "academic...

...The War in the Air," for instance, invokes pity and terror with quiet, ironic sentences: For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead, Who rarely bothered coming home to die But simply stayed away out there In the clean war, the war in the air...

...In praising the author of High Windows as "our modern," who understands us "not as we would be/Understood in smartass critical remarks,/But as we are...//Dear Larkin of the anastrophic mind,/Forever now among the undeceived," Nemerov might have been unconsciously writing an appropriate epitaph for himself...

...But he could also adopt the tough-guy pseudocynicism of Damon Runyon and toss off impudent observations, as in "Love": A sandwich and a beer might cure these ills If only boys and Girls were Bars and Grills...

...The poems bring into sharp focus a man of deep feeling who believed that our thoughts are intertwined with our emotions, and that compassion is demonstrated, not emoted, in poetry as in life...

...The late Howard Nemerov's Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (Chicago, 157 pp., $ 18.95) has forcibly reminded me of this shift in perception...

...when he actually composed an ode "To the Congress of the United States Entering Its Third Century," and "Witnessing the Launch of the Shuttle Atlantis" (commissioned by nasa...

...A great teacher, he scrupulously avoided inculcating us with his opinions or tastes...

...Nemerov's true theme was always the interplay between the human mind and its surroundings, the way our instinct to find meaningful patterns around us illuminates nature, which in turn teases us into further exploration of its mysteries...

...These cavils rarely apply to the actual work under attack, however...

...The collection's title poem echoes his earlier half-jesting manner, offering an "inveterate infantile hope/That the road ends but as the runway does...

...These late poems based on early experiences, he explained, virtually welled out of him...

...morose," "darkly witty," "autumnal," "sardonic...

...At that moment, the actors stand "tired, disheveled, sweating through the paint/radiant with our happiness and theirs," and we seem to be joined with those real people who are about to depart forever from our lives...

...I must end with a personal acknowledgment of profound gratitude to Howard Nemerov...

...The phenomenon surely would have intrigued the author of such essays as "Bottom's Dream: On the Likeness BetweenPoems and Jokes...

...Even those who held him in greatest esteem wondered whether he wasn't too aloof and calm to be quite real...

...But the verses were cathartic, too: They released a vulnerability in him that made him less an Emersonian sage, more a hurt human being...

...From the joking and sadness implicit in "Myth & Ritual," where the close of a poker game represents the final exit of two close companions, to the straightforward grief of "To Joy Our Student, Bidding Adieu," he appeared to learn how to mourn openly...

...They wanted, just occasionally, to hear him "Rage, rage against the dying of the light...

...He never fit into any of the prominent (or, for that matter, obscure) categories they are inclined to impose...

...the ones that in whatever tongue Worded the world, that were the first to say Star, water, stone, that said the visible And made it bring invisibles to view In wind and time and change, and in the mind Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world And spoke the speechless world and sang the tongues Of the city into the astonished sky...

...Poet Laureate...

...We approach a completed body of work very differently than we do the latest installment of an oeuvre still emerging...

...He introduced me to contemporary verse when I was his student at Bennington College...

...This audience hailed Nemerov as heir apparent to the Life magazine image of Robert Frost: a poet of the American landscape, whose wise, wry sensibility and plain speaking offered a refreshing change from embarrassing confessionalism, esthetic density and other excesses of the postmodernist scene...

...Nemerov played up to this caricature, particularly at poetry readings, with his typical uniform of a blue denim jacket and work shirt, and his penchant for choosing poems bearing tides like "Einstein and Freud and Jack...

...Outside the somewhat incestuous world of contemporary literature aficionados there lives a breed of readers attracted to the cadences of late 19th- and early 20th-century verse...

...Yet their standard descriptives...

...hardly do justice to the man who wrote these Unes from "The Blue Swallows": Finding again the world, That is the point, where loveliness Adorns intelligible things Because the mind's eye lit the sun...

...He was then The New Leader's poetry critic...

...The poems show that he came to accept his destiny while airborne over the English Channel, looking out "along the Frisian shores...

...And this no doubt was confirmed during his reappointment to the oneyear position in 1988 under its inflated new title, U.S...

...Trying Conclusions is his last, lyrical expression of that principle...

...Perhaps reviewers have been confounded by Nemerov's disparate styles...

...Some especially perceptive readers found Nemerov's acceptance of the world as it is a kind of disconcerting fatalism...

...One of the hitherto uncollected late poems in the new volume is a moving farewell to a British poet-critic Nemerov must have found a soulmate: Imagine Larkin going among the dead Not yet at home there, as he wasn't here, A nd doing them the way he did The Old Fools, With edged contempt becoming sympathy Of a sort, and sympathy contempt for death...

...Instead, he worked to encourage us to share his reverence for the incantatory language of poetry because he was convinced that it gives form and definition to our world, and helps make sense of it...

...not waving, but blessing his readers...

...This quality also became pronounced in the increasingly frequent elegies he wrote for dead friends...

...Indeed, one can imagine the kind of witty meditation he would have written about it...