A paperback reprint of the terrific 1991 collection that includes some of the late Nemerov's (1920-1991) best poems, short stories, essays, and his comic novel Federigo, Or, the Power of Love. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The former Poet Laureate of the United States, Nemerov gives us a lucid and precise twist on the commonplaces of everyday life. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. "Howard Nemerov is a witty, urbane, thoughtful poet, grounded in the classics, a master of the craft. It is refreshing to read his work. . . . "—Minneapolis Tribune "The world causes in Nemerov a mingled revulsion and love, and a hopeless hope is the most attractive quality in his poems, which slowly turn obverse to reverse, seeing the permanence of change, the vices of virtue, the evanescence of solidities and the errors of truth."—Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review

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

Every day people tune in to The Writer's Almanac on public radio and hear Garrison Keillor read them a poem. And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by the narrator for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." The title Good Poems comes from common literary parlance. For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness. Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" is a good poem, and so is James Wright's "A Blessing." Regular people love those poems. People read them aloud at weddings, people send them by e-mail. Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.

Investigative analyst Nemerov compares the rhetoric and the legislation to the reality of how gun control's promises and laws have come to affect real people.

A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York “The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.” ―Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew―and left her mark on―the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions. Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments--from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg―comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world. Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.

Silent Dialogues, by art historian Alexander Nemerov, is a probing, intimate reflection about photographer Diane Arbus, the author's aunt, and her brother, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Howard Nemerov, the author's father. "I have no memories of Diane Arbus," begins Alexander Nemerov in the first of two meditative essays that comprise this book. "A Resemblance" examines Howard Nemerov's complicated responses to his sister's photography. "The School" focuses on a body of Arbus' work known as the Untitled series, photographs made at residences for the mentally disabled between 1969 and 1971, in the last years of her life. Through their work, the author explores the siblings' disparate and distinct sensibilities, and in doing so uncovers signs of an unexpected aesthetic kinship. Illustrations complementing the essays include numerous examples of Arbus' photographs; paintings by artists as diverse as Pieter Brueghel, Norman Rockwell, Paul Feeley and Johannes Vermeer; and a selection of poems by Howard Nemerov, chosen by his son.