War Stories: Poems about Long Ago and Now

by Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov has written often about wars great and small, the overtly political and the deeply personal. But only with the passage of time, a heightening of technique and deepening of insight, has he been able to write from his experience in World War II as he does here, where historical past and personal history finally dovetail. From "The War in the Heavens" to "The War in the Streets," Nemerov chronicles with devastating grace the harrowing of life."These new poems of Howard Nemerov are the poems of a master at his best. What is more, they are accessible. They speak out in a beautiful unclouded voice of the experience of a flyer of the Second World War. Although as 'war poems' they take their place among the best of that genre, they resonate far beyond their history with an arresting immediacy."—Karl Shapiro"Nemerov is the poet of our sanity, his the vision of the heroic ordinary. . . . Forty years after W. W. II, Nemerov's experiences in that war translate into timeless poetry. . . . Nemerov's poetry will outlast our to read it now is to take part in something of ourselves and our world that will—and should—endure."— The Virginia Quarterly Review"Throughout all his verse, formal language sets up a proscenium, keeping sentiment at a distance. In this elegant theatre, he tells stories that always, first, are works of art."—Denise Low, Kansas City Star

Genres: Poetry

60 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1987

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1987, this was one of the very last collections published by Pulitzer-winning master Howard Nemerov before he died in 1991, and, as might be expected, it reads like the work of an older man, glazed with a sort of resigned bemusement at the folly of the world, its governments and its societies and its wars (there is a middle section drawing from Nemerov's experiences as an airman in World War II).

The poems are mostly short, usually a page in length and no more than two. With regard to form, they could be described as blank-verse-ish (with occasional subtle rhymes here and there), though with a different approach to prosody than, say, Lowell's blank verse or anyone else's blank verse that I can think of right now: they are supple, natural, and assured in their use of metrical substitutions. To me, such short formal poems are like little sitting rooms: cozy, carpeted, attractively lit, and therefore inviting. A poet's task in a poem is to create a room inviting enough to lure the reader in: once the reader has been lured, the poet may do anything he pleases -- dazzle, discomfit, even explode the floor out from under the reader's feet if he feels so inclined. But first he must get the reader in the room. These poems get the reader in the room.

My favorite poems were "On Reading King Lear Again, 1984" and "A Christmas Card of Halley's Comet" because, amid a field of poems characterized by realism and a sort of quiet jaded wit, these two poems contain, surprisingly, a glimmer -- just the faintest glimmer -- of the transcendent, the holy beyond. In the King Lear poem, the aging speaker has an epiphany about the Shakespeare play: "Maybe the one last thing King Lear's about / Is God's way with his people and the world," and he goes on to elaborate that the responses of Lear's daughters to their father's "How much do you love me?" query are "like the prayer demanded of the prey, / 'Now tell me what you really think of me, / Before I kill you anyhow.'" The poem ends thus (with a brilliant, twinkling use of slant-rhyme and internal rhyme):

"The god who gives the world away to kids
Will go a long road and a rainy night
Before his wits give way and he forgives."

I admire this poem's convincing argument, its ordinary colloquial language ("kids"), how, albeit with restraint and utter lack of sentimentality, it admits the possibility of divine forgiveness, something simultaneously inexplicable yet on some level comprehensible.

The Halley's comet poem, also arranged in Dante-esque tercets (and placed immediately following an unrhymed but metered sonnet titled "To Dante"), contemplates how the comet

"...wastes the rest of time crossing the vast
That separates one nothing from the next.
Words fail us, and The Word, that failed before."

(Again, note the use of slant rhyme, and also of alliteration -- not ostentatious like a novice's but marked by the control and subtlety of a poet Karl Shapiro describes on the back cover as "a master at his best.")

There is a Robert Lowell poem that ends with the immortally witty lines,

"if we see a light at the end of the tunnel,
it's the light of an oncoming train."

Nemerov was in conversation with Lowell's lines when he wrote his slant-rhymed epigrammatic masterpiece "Ultima Ratio Reagan," a poem whose title puns on the Latin phrase "ultima ratio regum" (which can be translated literally as "the final argument of kings" or figuratively as "a resort to arms" and historically was used as a motto by King Louis XIV):

"The reason we do not learn from history is
Because we are not the people who learned last time.

"Because we are not the same people as them
That fed our sons and honor to Vietnam
And dropped the burning money on their trees,

"We know that we know better than they knew,
And history will not blame us if once again
The light at the end of the tunnel is the train."