SOURCE: Lattimore, Richmond. “Poetry Chronicle.” Hudson Review 19 (spring 1976): 113-14.

In the following excerpted review, Hudson says that the poems in The Western Approaches continue to delight the reader.

Howard Nemerov¹ goes on and on and on writing good poems; almost always in iambics, occasionally rhymed quatrains or sonnets but mostly blank verse. As yet another book comes out or an entire number of Poetry is devoted to him, I keep expecting to find that he is (like some I could name) writing too much. Not so. He seldom fails, he constantly delights, and I have asked myself what his secret is. It is not in the prosody. The versification, like the tone of discourse, is low-keyed, and strict count is maintained to a degree that even suggests incomplete confidence. I wish he would rumple his lines a little more. But he has exceptional qualities of mind and he...