[May Swenson is described] on the jacket [of Another Animal] as having come from Utah "to New York City where she holds an active job." One looks to the next sentence to hear what this may be. No: "Her poems have appeared" etc. It is hard to know whether to be pleased that she holds an active job, or sorry, for an inactive job is surely better for a poet. The difficulties in communication with which modern poetry is charged have reached the jackets. The energy of her versemaking, though, suggests that the job can hardly be too active for her; her first selection is as long as Harry Duncan's and Murray Noss's together, and franker, and more experimental, and vervier. She splits her eighty pages into four sections. With the first and the fourth let us dispense, and she might have done; although the first, which consists of descriptive poems, contains one good description, a fair pastiche of Miss [Marianne] Moore ("Sketch for a Landscape" and "Horse and Swan Feeding" these are), and the least dramatic account of a lion's private parts that I have seen for some time. Nor is this an exceptional passage, and one hesitates to attribute it to the influence of her general master, Cummings, because other young poets have been doing the same sort of thing—I suppose, to prove that they are not squeamish, for no real use is made of these passages which import perfectly valid but obviously difficult material. A poet is to prove that he is not squeamish, as a poet (his private attitude being nothing), by being absolutely responsible for his material and its psychological or spiritual employment, while technically he is absolutely independent of both; flourishes will not do at all; Baudelaire is our best locus here for both success and failure, unless the reader can call up a better one, and I concede that Rochester at his level gives a sharper black-and-white. The details of pain and humiliation fall under all this along with the various obscene areas; and the subject is of importance, not so much because of Joyce's celebrated admirable, nervous, limited, and driven explorations, as for other reasons: first, the broad squeamishness of American writers as Americans, and second, the supreme exception, in the greatest poem yet written on this continent, "Song of Myself."

Miss Swenson shows that she is probably not squeamish in the love-poems of her second section and in the poems about death in her third section. There are some chat-poems, like those James Laughlin used to write (maybe he still does), such as "The Key to Everything"; and sometimes she lets the last line do the work. Both these bad kinds of poems are pleasant. But she uses both Cummings's cursory and organ styles ("Evolution"; "Why We Die"; "Organelle"; "To Confirm a Thing") and these poems are her best; besides, she writes about her own death as if she had it in mind. It will be interesting to see what she does next. Miss Adrienne Cecile Rich is more accomplished, of course, so far, but I don't know that anyone else is. It is not the least of Miss Swenson's signs that she is livelier at sonal organization over a paragraph or passage than in a phrase or line, though she can make a line ("Yield to the wizard's piercing kiss"). She probably does not revise enough. Who does?