SOURCE: Wood, James. “Howard Nemerov: A Thoughtful Mildness.” Poetry Review 81 (spring 1991): 10-12.

In the following essay, Wood laments the neglect of Nemerov's work in British publications and praises the poet's ironic vision.

Randall Jarrell had a famous quip about poetic status: ‘The poet has a peculiar relation to the public. It is unaware of his existence’. In this country, Howard Nemerov certainly has a peculiar relation to the public: he hasn't been published by a British publisher since 1968¹. Nemerov's work is civilized, lenient, ruminative. His voice combines irony and lyricism—the democratic tones of post-war America, heard also in Wilbur and James Merrill, in Cheever and Updike: a public-spirited wryness, a serene and civil calm fed by personal intensities, disturbance, but threatening at moments to break out into impoliteness or revelatory explicitness. He is a major poet, garlanded with awards (his Collected Poems won both the National Book...