Swenson, May - Edward Hirsch (essay date 1992)
Edward Hirsch (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: In a review of The Love Poems of May Swenson, in the New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1992, pp. 12-13.
[Hirsch is the author of Wild Gratitude (1986), which received The National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Below, he lauds The Love Poems of May Swenson.]
"Listen, there's just one 'Don't,' one 'Keep Off,' / one 'Keep Away From,'" May Swenson advised the graduating class in her 1982 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poem, "Some Quadrangles": "Don't be a clone." Whatever you do, she enjoined them, "make your own / moves. Go opposite, or upside down, or Odd." As a poet May Swenson, who died in 1989 at the age of 76, certainly took her own advice. She was an American original, and her poems—with their astonishing formal variety, their quirky visual shapes and incantatory rhythms, and their refreshingly odd, insightful observations about the natural world—stand by...
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