Among important mid-century American poets, Howard Nemerov is perhaps the most disarming. Hardly a disparaging claim has been made against his work that he has not acknowledged or preempted. As he says in "Attentiveness and Obedience" (1966): "The charge typically raised ... has been that my poems are jokes, even bad jokes. I incline to agree, insisting however that they are bad jokes, and even terrible jokes, emerging from the nature of things as well as from my propensity for coming at things a touch subversively and from the blind side, or the dark side, the side everyone concerned with 'values' would just as soon forget." His low-key emotional display, his serious intellect, his habitual irony, his precise, dispassionate language, his tendencies to sententiousness, conventional modern paradox, and convoluted syntax, as well as his dark joking, are all subjects of his own commentary in prose, poetry, and interview. But that...