Swenson, May - X. J. Kennedy (essay date 1964)

X. J. Kennedy (essay date 1964)

SOURCE: "Underestimations," in Poetry, Vol. CIII, No. 5, February, 1964, pp. 330-33.

[Recognized as a national authority on poetry, Kennedy is well respected as a poet for adults as well as children. His verse is written in traditional metric patterns and acknowledged for its amusing and incisive qualities. In the following review, Kennedy praises To Mix with Time.]

For once it is easy to agree with a jacket blurb, this by Robert Lowell, who declares that May Swenson's poems "should be hung with permanent fresh paint signs." In her vision Miss Swenson has become again as a child, but a highly sophisticated child who knows her way around both the Piazza San Marco and the New York subway system. Who but she would see the Statue of Liberty's torch as a tip of asparagus? The exactness of eye recalls that of Marianne Moore or Elizabeth Bishop, but Miss Swenson is not to be filed among imitators. (Why,...

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