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, incidentally, do our best woman poets look at things closer-up than our best men do?) Often she strikes out past familiar forms, yet always comes upon new ones. Many—"The Fountains of Aix," the skyscraper-shaped "The Totem"—aren't mere experiment. They work. And if Miss Swenson obviously cares about how a poem looks on the page, she cares how it listens, too. In "The Word 'Beautiful,'" for instance, the subject is metamorphosed to a

Long, glossy caterpillar
with softest feet
of audible and inaudible vowels;

while in "Spring Uncovered"—in a statement that sounds so voluptuous you'd think it would be taxed—"a grackle, fat as burgundy, / gurgles on a limb." A passage too purple for words, I thought at first; then realized that Miss Swenson employs sound here not just for its own sake, but for the sake of all the size, shape, color, balance, and throatiness that grackle and winebottle have in common.

Static rather than dramatic, oftener concerned with places and animals than with persons, Miss Swenson's work might be misread at a glance to seem slighter than it is. From such titles as "Fireflies" or "Sunday in the Country," you might expect the kind of poem used in fashion magazines to keep the perfume ads apart; but though, indeed, some of her poems have been so used, there isn't anything trivial about May Swenson. If anyone thinks her work lightweight, let him read the poems so titled; or ponder "The Wish To Escape into Inner Space," "How To Be Old," "The Contraption" (a poem about a roller-coaster ride, perhaps also about living and dying); or "Death, Great Smoothener"; or "Question," with its soft beginning,

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

—the whole of which poem lands with the impact of a blockbuster. There are forty-nine new poems in To Mix with Time, plus the gist of two earlier collections. May Swenson often goes deep, seriously deep; but she also persuades, as no other recent poet I can think of, that gaiety still is possible.