SOURCE: Thomas, D. M. “The Agony and the Entropy.” Times Literary Supplement (11 June 1976): 697.

In the following excerpted review of The Western Approaches, Thomas finds the poems somewhat world-weary and the metrical patterns repetitive.

America's troubles and introspections shadow [some recent] books. In Howard Nemerov's case, they help to create a tone of sadness, irony and ennui.

The physical law of entropy and two images, sea and tree, are the polarities of Nemerov's The Western Approaches. Entropy does its work in wearing down America to a land of the middle-aged middle-class watching the “coloured shadows” of football games; wearing down the music of the spheres to pedestrian prose; the lead of the artist's pencil; the onset of autumn and age. Against this depressing and universal decline, the sea, which is “a little more mysterious than that”, and the tree, in the Yeatsian sense of great-rooted blossomer, provide consolation.

As...