SOURCE: "The Urban Landscape," in The Stillness in Moving Things: The World of Howard Nemerov, Memphis State University Press, 1975, pp. 119-42.

In the following essay, Mills states that Nemerov's poetry of the urban landscape "concentrates on the most powerful institutions of society" and "is particularly concerned with the tyranny of the past over the present."

Nemerov's poetry divides itself between contemplative poetry, which most often springs from his encounter with nature, and satiric poetry that finds its nourishment in disparities and paradoxes that reveal themselves in the urban scene. To say that the poetry is divided in subject matter and concern is not, however, to say that the poet is divided. These disparities and paradoxes are revealed by a vision that knows the difference in authentic and inauthentic existence, and knows the call of conscience. This vision knows that for someone to say there is a boom in...