[May Swenson's New and Selected Things Taking Place] is obviously meant to stand as a capstone to her career as a poet. Sixty poems come from the years since 1970, but the larger part of the book is a selection from five previous books of poems. We can thus, with New and Selected Things Taking Place, come to a full appreciation of her poetic goals and methods.

I think I might call May Swenson a meditative poet. However, it is the character of her meditations that ought to be distinguished here, however briefly. To do that, it may be useful to place her in the history of a certain kind of poetry during the 20th Century; that is, a kind of poetry [Imagism] that claimed attention during the first thirty years of this century…. The Imagist poets aimed at simplifying syntax, eliminating verbiage and thus getting rid of a whole accumulated weight of centuries of social ideas, conventions, sentiments and ways of taking the world and emotions for granted. To do this, they concentrated on objects, on the way things appeared, on elementary sensations, sight and sound and touch.

The classic Imagist anthology is full of severe and simple poems; but the movement soon developed in other ways. Swenson may be said to derive from Marianne Moore's poetry. And Moore made complex, prose-rhythmic structures, mostly descriptive and tightly intellectual in their forms and formulations. Moore furthermore hid her own emotions away completely: her passion is to be found in a kind of moralizing of the world of things, a strong ethical meaning that all her poems convey. Not religious or social ethics, but the ethics of a stoical individualism, of the disciplined mind's contemplation of subjects for poetry. Swenson reduces Moore's coloration of the world by means of her ethics to a form of seeing or hearing. She makes many kinds of verbal structures; she is playful and varied; and she is very impersonal. She says she thinks of her poems as "things"—as objects meant to occupy a place on a page. She says, "No thing is like any other, while everything resembles many another. This conundrum applies to all phenomena, in nature and experience. The new made thing turns out to be both unique and familiar."

As a result we have an intense concentration on descriptions of landscapes, or on actions set in landscapes. There is a sense that the poet has been a tourist to several parts of the world, and written her poems as forms of snapshots and memorabilia. Of course her [perspective] takes in far more than the camera, and indeed she often manages to place herself in the landscape too, and in such ways that one soon realizes that her emotions are at work in very odd and sometimes ecstatic ways, so that we find a constant attempt to identify with the world of things as they are in the world…. [The] result is a somewhat mystical vision. I call it mystical simply because it is imaginative and not scientifically objective … we are talking about a poet, not a scientist, after all, who must measure his things, to begin with. Nor are we talking about a philosopher either, who must account for the ways things take place…. [The] poet's task comes before either scientist or philosopher, for it describes the things that take place, and even, to speak more truly, puts them there for us, on the page….

[One] might say that there is and always has been, through Swenson's ruthless suppression of surface emotions and ideas and personality a sort of coldness, a detached eye, amused however, and indifferent….