Poetry Criticism | Swenson, May - Michael Heller (essay date 1988)

Michael Heller (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: "Owls, Monkeys and Spiders in Space," in The New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1988, p. 15.

[An American poet, educator, and critic, Heller has published a study entitled Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry (1984). In the following excerpt from a review of In Other Words, he calls attention to the combination of wordplay and seriousness in Swenson's poetry.]

In Other Words is anything but reticent. May Swenson concatenates elegant structures which, like the flora in her poem "In Florida," bloom into "extravagant blushes." It is no surprise that she is one of our best writers of poetry for young readers; her poems make use of dizzying repetitions and rhythms and wear the bright polychromes of play blocks. Yet this is not childlike poetry; the hard, sharp edges are nearly always vaguely menacing. Like the lurid green plastic shrubbery in...

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