SOURCE: Vendler, Helen. A review of Collected Poems. New York Times Book Review (7 December 1977): 14.

In the following review of Nemerov's Collected Poems, Vendler points to the poet's attempts to find meaning in an unsettling world.

When Stevens wrote about his “Collected Poems” as “The Planet on the Table,” he meant that a life's poetry, like a terrestrial globe, reproduces (though in a reduced scale) the whole world. The world as Nemerov knows it is revealed, prophetically, in the title of his first (1947) volume, The Image and the Law. The world comes to us in images; the mind seeks a law in the heterogeneous information infiltrating the senses. A late poem shows Nemerov as a boy confronting “The Book of Knowledge,” “a luxury liner on [a] sea unfathomable of ignorance,” with poetry “as steady, still, and rare / As the lighthouses now unmanned and obsolete.” These three things—our already...