SOURCE: Pettingell, Phoebe. “Knowledge Turning into Dream: Recollections of Howard Nemerov.” Sewanee Review 100, no. 4 (1992): 706-15.

In the following essay, Pettingell, a former student of Nemerov's and the wife of his colleague Stanley Hyman, offers both a review of Trying Conclusions and personal recollections of Nemerov.

We stand now in the place and limit of time Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream, And nightmares still contained in sleeping dark Seem on the point of bringing into day The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up. 

—“Magnitudes,” Trying Conclusions (1991)

As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping, The interpretation is the next room of the dream. 

—“To Clio, Muse of History,” The Next Room of the Dream (1962)

That Howard Nemerov chose to make his exit from poetry with a pun comes as no surprise. In his final collection, Trying Conclusions, he manages to pack multiple associations into two...