[In the following review, Corn applauds the poems in The Love Poems of May Swenson, which he asserts are, except one, all erotic in nature.]

Maybe I had too high expectations for this collection when it was first announced. A new book by May Swenson is always welcome, and this time normal anticipation was heightened by the possibility that her estate had decided to publish work that shyness or prudence had prevented her from making available during her lifetime. Hopes slipped a notch when the credits page stated that only thirteen of the poems were previously unpublished; five have before now appeared in magazines, but the remaining thirty-seven can be found in earlier volumes of her poetry.

The title isn't quite accurate. For "love" we should substitute "erotic." In a quite good poem called "Café Tableau," the eroticism involved is not even the author's but high-voltage description of the visible attraction between a white woman and a black waiter. Only in the poem "Year of the Double Spring" (one of the poems already collected) is the poet's beloved portrayed in non-erotic contexts so as to emerge as specific and individual—one result being that painful currents of feeling are allowed to appear as they inevitably must when love beyond pure eroticism is dealt with realistically. Partly for that reason "Year of the Double Spring" is the poem I liked best in the volume:

     I'm thinking of how I leaned on you, you leaning
     in the stone underpass striped with shadows of tracks
     and ties, and I said, "Give me a kiss, A.D.,
     even if you are tranquilized," and I'm thinking
     of the Day of the Kingfisher, the Indigo Day of the Bunting,
     of the Catfish Night I locked the keys in the car
     and you tried to jimmy in, but couldn't with a clothes hanger.

We later see A.D. at a juke joint, pretending to "flake out on the bench," still later, "riffling Playboy." Perfect accessibility, perfect unity is not being described: this is a believable love.

Here, as in all the other poems in this volume, the beloved is addressed as "you," never as "she." Agreed, second-person address is more intimate than the third-person, and it removes an obstacle (minor or enormous, depending on the reader) that stands in the way of entire identification with the poet. At a time when we are witnessing the emergence of a new lesbian poetry, it is also a lost opportunity—not just at the level of bare fact or politics, either. When the poet composes with a built-in hindrance, other kinds of unconscious hindrances are likely to operate as well. Not every feeling will be within reach, a loss for the poet and for the audience, unless the audience belongs to those (including, alas, Elizabeth Bishop) who "wish they would just keep it to themselves." The sex of the beloved could, of course, be made explicit even in poems addressed to "you," but this happens glancingly in only a couple of instances where the poet mentions, "our breasts." Otherwise we have to "guess," as the jeans ad tells to, peering intently through the gorgeous beaded curtain of this poet's language where we believe we can see two women, and not the nude male-female couple of the pretty cover photograph. No one who did not come of age as a lesbian in the 1940s, though, has the right to judge Swenson's (or Bishop's) choices, so I will shut up.

The women glimpsed in these poems are in any case very fulfilled. To find physical pleasure rendered as ecstatically as this, you'd have to go to the Bible—The Song of Songs—or friezes of Hindu temples. It's as though the poet were paraphrasing Whitman, saying, "There's a lot of us and all so luscious."

     In the sun's heart we are ripe
     as fruits ourselves, enjoyed
     by lips of wind our burnished slopes.
     All round us dark, rapt
     bumble-eyes of susans are deployed
     as if to suck our honey-hides. Ants nip,
     tasting us all over
     with tickling pincers. We are a landscape
     to daddy-long-legs, whose ovoid
     hub on stilts climbs us like a lover,
     trying our dazzle, our warm sap.
                 [—"One Moraing in New Hampshire"]

It's true that, reading this and some of the other more rapturous poems, I had to contend with feeling like a third wheel or some irrelevant daddy-long-legs, enjoying borrowed glory. It may also be true that the storehouse of traditional metaphoric terms for sex is pretty quickly used up: sex is like a dip in the ocean, the visit of a honeybee to a flower, it is like daring to eat a peach or being turned into pure gold. Uninterrupted delight produces a strangely solemn effect in any lyric longer than eight lines, which will always need at least a minimal plot beyond the very familiar one of tingle-to-ecstasy.

On the other hand, when the comic narrative of a poem like "Wednesday at the Waldorf" seems to invite the laughter of an audience in on the joke, almost everyone will cheerfully go along with it:

     Two white whales have been installed at
     the Waldorf. They are tumbling slowly
     above the tables, butting the chandeliers,
     submerging, and taking soft bites
     out of the red-vested waiters in the
     Peacock Room. They are poking fleurs-de-lys
     tails into the long pockets on the
     waiters' thighs. They are stealing
     breakfast strawberries from two eccentric
     guests—one, skunk-cabbage green with
     dark peepers—the other, wild rose and
     milkweed, barelegged, in Lafayette loafers.

The buoyant anarchists somehow follow Swenson's two guests up the elevator to their rooms, where, presumably, Lafayette loafers are kicked off before the pair get in bed and allow the no doubt female Mobys to inspire them to still greater heights. This poem has to be added to the growing literature about one of old New York's classic hotels, the best known example up to now Steven's "Arrival at the Waldorf," for him a hotel "Where the wild poem is a substitute / For the woman one loves or ought to love…."

There are actually an impressive number of other memorable poems in this collection, "Swimmers," "Early Morning: Cape Cod," "Each Day of Summer," "Organs," "The School of Desire," and "Dark Wild Honey," for example. But I will conclude by quoting "Our Forward Shadows," which is suggestive in metaphysical as well as physical ways. Swenson seems to sense that she is on the brink of something for which sex is, apart from being fun, also a metaphor, a metaphor we might understand as describing a future tradition Swenson's poetry is helping to found:

     we are dressed
     each in the other's kisses
 
     our shadows reach
     to teach us our parts
 
     the enchanted prelude starts

Forward, shadows!