Newman 1224. "One poem about Vietnam is included among sixty pages of poems..."
Howard Nemerov (1920-1991): One of the most prolific and respected American poets of the twentieth century. From 1942 to 1944 he served with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and afterward with the US Army Air Forces as a bomber pilot until the end of the war. A graduate of Harvard, he later became a Poet Laureate of the United States, and earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. Throughout his work, he engaged his readers with the genius of an unwavering intelligence.
Howard Nemerov has written often about wars great and small, the overtly political and the deeply personal. But only with the passage of time, a heightening of technique and deepening of insight, has he been able to write from his experience in World War II as he does here, where historical past and personal history finally dovetail. From "The War in the Heavens" to "The War in the Streets," Nemerov chronicles with devastating grace the harrowing of life.
"These new poems of Howard Nemerov are the poems of a master at his best. What is more, they are accessible. They speak out in a beautiful unclouded voice of the experience of a flyer of the Second World War. Although as 'war poems' they take their place among the best of that genre, they resonate far beyond their history with an arresting immediacy."--Karl Shapiro
"Nemerov is the poet of our sanity, his the vision of the heroic ordinary. . . . Forty years after W. W. II, Nemerov's experiences in that war translate into timeless poetry. . . . Nemerov's poetry will outlast our generation: to read it now is to take part in something of ourselves and our world that will--and should--endure."--The Virginia Quarterly Review
"Throughout all his verse, formal language sets up a proscenium, keeping sentiment at a distance. In this elegant theatre, he tells stories that always, first, are works of art."--Denise Low, Kansas City Star
Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot, first in the Royal Canadian Air Force and later the U. S. Army Air Forces. He married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book.
