SOURCE: Kinzie, Mary. “The Judge Is Rue.” Poetry 138 (September 1981): 344-50.

In the following review, Kinzie expresses disappointment in the general quality of Sentences while praising several of the individual poems.

The last poem in Howard Nemerov's new Sentences is called “Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry.” It is about rain gradually turning into snow, but still acting like rain (only somehow lighter and thicker), until—there is suddenly snow flying instead of rain falling. The poem rhymes as a quatrain and a couplet and is composed in Howard Nemerov's own pentameter, an organism we recognize by the off-handed inversions of sentence order that sound at once decorous and colloquial; by that studied freedom of address and careful familiarity with old puns (“clearly flew”); and by the chill, dry precision of analogy (“gradient … aslant … random”). To these idiosyncratic marks of character, Nemerov adds the unassuming...