War Stories: Poems about Long Ago and Now - Softcover

Nemerov, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226572439 ISBN 13: 9780226572437

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1990

Synopsis

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 generation: 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

About this title

Review:

The Afterlife
All Things Made New For Now
At Sixties And Seventies
Authorities
The Biographer's Mandate
The Bluejay And The Mockingbird
The Celestial Emperor
A Christmas Card Of Halley's Comet
Commencement
Crotchets
D-day + All The Years
Double Negative
Drowning The Book
Economic Man
The Faith
Fellowship
Found Poem
Freezing The Rain
Happy Hour
Iff
In The Beginning
In Transit
Intimations
Landscape With Self-portrait
Low-level Cross-country
Models
More Joy In Heaven
Night Operations, Coastal Command Raf
Night Piece
On An Occaision Of National Mourning
On Reading King Lear Again, 1984
Parabola
Playing The Machine
A Reader Of Mysteries
Remembering The Way
The Royal Visit
The Shadow Side
The Shopping Mall, The Moral Law
Theater Of The Absurd
To Dante
To Joy Our Student, Bidding Adieu
To Peter Raven On His Fiftieth Birthday
Two Person %zero-sum
Ultima Ratio Reagan
The War In The Air
World Lines; A War Story
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

From Library Journal:

This well-executed, satisfying collection focuses on Nemerov's experiences as a World War II fighter pilot: "The sweeping swallows low above the swale/ Among the insect victims as they rise/ To be picked off, and peace is satisfied." Reconsidered some 40 years later, his war resonates with irony: "That was the good war, the war we won/ As if there were no death, for goodness' sake." In fact, the sense of life "in transit" animates most of these poems: "the world/ Flowing away the way it always does,/ As if it were made of time." His subjects range from the topicalHalley's comet, the Shuttle disasterto the personal, like his elegy for a student. At his best, Nemerov weds craft and vision to irony: "Though God be dead, he lived so far away/ His sourceless light continues to fall on us." For contemporary collections. Robert Hudzik, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0226572439
• ISBN 13: 9780226572437
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 70