George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism provides a fresh and engaging study of Oppen's work, his life and his relationship with the Objectivist movement. Previous criticism has tended to see Objectivism as a late offshoot of modernism; Nicholls repudiates this idea through an investigation of the motivations and influences behind Oppen's return to writing after twenty-five years of exile and poetic silence. At the end of this period, in which the poet had become temporally and ideologically distanced from the era of high modernism as well as from his Objectivist roots, Nicholls shows us a writer “mindful of the pitfalls of avant-gardism and deeply sceptical of claims for the political efficacy of poetry” (38).

Oppen's return to writing is characterized as a project of departure, with the poet defining his work against that of modernists such as Pound, determined not to replicate their failures. For Oppen, modernism had fallen short of its aim to represent the trauma of the early part of the century because of its desire for closure: its pursuit of the truth was limited by formal and cultural agendas. Fundamental to his decision to write again was an investigation of the ethical territory onto which poetry inevitably steps and a close look at art's capacity to respond to the demands of the real. Nicholls charts a chronological discussion of Oppen's later work against the influences that stimulated his new ideas and their progression, looking closely at the poet's readings of Hegel and Heidegger especially, but also at his reading of Pound, Blake and others.

In response to the perceived formal and ideological closure of modernism, in which the real world is subordinated to the intellectual world of the poem, Oppen's writing is revealed as a process of exploration, by which meaning and direction are discovered through the act of writing. Reading each of his later collections as a new beginning, Nicholls analyses their pared-down style and the negative philosophy behind their stripping away of everything extraneous to the study of existence.

One of the strengths of this book is its extensive use of unpublished materials – notes and drafts from Oppen's archive – to shed light on his poems. It also provides a compelling rereading of Objectivism through Oppen's own continual reassessment of its usefulness as a term. Nicholls emphasizes the development of a discrete and original poetic and conveys a sense of the introspections at the heart of a literary career. At its best the book is a moving portrayal of a poet struggling with the weight of modernism as well as with the ethical problems of representation in postwar America.