The author of 17 volumes of poetry, Nathan has been described as "a fixture for 50 years in literary circles both on and off the UC Berkeley campus."
Ted Kooser, a recent U.S. poet laureate and an English professor at the
University of Nebraska–Lincoln, counted Nathan among his mentors, particularly for his "economy of words." "He was among the finest poets of his generation and will be missed by all of us who practice the art", said Kooser, who struck up a correspondence with Nathan in the 1970s after complimenting Nathan on a poem he had seen in a magazine. Nathan's first book of poems,
Western Reaches, brims with images of the California landscape. After a year in India, he published a book about his experiences there titled,
The Likeness: Poems out of India. That same year, Princeton University Press published Nathan's
Returning Your Call, which was nominated for a
National Book Award. His prose included
Diary of a Left-Handed Bird Watcher and ''The Poet's Work, an Introduction to
Czesław Miłosz''. He also collaborated on a number of translations, most notably with Milosz on the poems of
Anna Swir and
Aleksander Wat. Nathan died in
Marin, California in 2007. ==Bibliography==