SOURCE: '"Between the Wave and the Particle': Figuring Science in Howard Nemerov's Poems," in Mosaic, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall, 1990, pp. 37-50.

In the review below, Clark examines Nemerov's incorporation of science and technology into his works.

As reader, namer, knower, skeptic, Howard Nemerov has had a long and productive engagement with the material world and with the sciences which explore its laws, its oddities. His work alludes often to scientific and semi-scientific writing from Euclid to Einstein; his many, diverse sources include Goethe, Godei, Eddington, Sherrington, Freud, Whitehead, Russell; Herbert Muller, Scott Buchanan, Owen Barfield and Lewis Thomas.

Such engagement, though generally acknowledged, has curiously been given little detailed attention by critics of Nemerov's work. Peter Meinke, for example, notes broadly [in his Howard Nemerov, 1968] that Nemerov has become a "spokesman for the existential, science-oriented (or science-displaced), liberal mind of the twentieth century," and Julia Bartholomay argues simply...