176
PARTISAN REVIEW
Afterlives
TRYING CONCLUSIONS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1961-
1991. By Howard Nemerov.
University of Chicago Press. $18.95.
SELECTED POEMS. By Derek Mahon.
Viking/Gallery. $20.00.
SEEING THINGS. By Seamus Heaney.
Farrar Straus
&
Giroux. $19.00.
You know," Diane Arbus once said, "I'm going to be remembered for
being Howard N emerov's sister." Family genius is as unpredictable as the
judgments of posterity. While Arbus's claim seemed richly ironic during
the decade or so after her suicide in 1971, when her photographs of freaks
and drag queens were everywhere, it seems less so now. But neither her
diminished stature nor the recent vogue in favor of traditional verse forms
has pushed her brother's work into the spotlight. There are many possible
reasons for Nemerov's continuing obscurity: he lived most of his working
life in St. Louis; no single poem of his has achieved a secure place in an–
thologies; he preferred to publish with university presses. When he died
in the spring of 1992 after a long and honorable career, soon after a stint
as Poet Laureate of the United States, he seemed for a moment to cast a
more commanding shadow than he ever had during his lifetime .
Arbus was obsessed with disproportion, especially in human form.
Nemerov's art, by contrast, was
all
balance and poise; he loved Vermeer
for "pretending to no heroic stances or gestures." Such Apollonian virtues
isolated Nemerov during the swashbuckling sixties, and a defensive testi–
ness crept into his poetry: "The others went right on/ Talking about
form, talking about myth/ And the (so help us) need for a modern id–
iom." He was clearly thinking about his own work too when he wrote ,
in a late tribute to Philip Larkin: "He was our modern; in his attitude,/
And not in all that crap about free verse." Nearly all the poems included
in
Trying Conclusions,
selected from roughly the second two-thirds of
Nemerov's career, are in iambic pentameter, more blank verse than
rhymed.
Nemerov once charted the career of the typical, self-aggrandizing
American poet:
