POET’S-EYE VIEW: MAY SWENSON

Review of Nature: Poems Old and New, by May Swenson, Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Jan. 1995). May Swenson (1913-1989) was a visionary poet, a prodigious observer of the fragile natural world, a poet who brought our deepest questions to the center of her work. By the time she died at 76 she had published some 450 poems in ten books, including a few poems that rank among the finest composed in the late twentieth century.

Literate Obsessions

This review of The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos by Anne Carson appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 19, No. 1 (October 2001). Anne Carson’s seventh book, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos is a poem about an erotic relationship that proceeds from adolescent fixation to post-divorce continuing fixation.

Review of Working the Garden

This review of Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture by William Conlogue appeared in Technology and Culture Vo. 44, No. 2 (2003), 421-422. During the past century, American food production has undergone a radical transformation as the family farm has given way to industrial agriculture – to farm as factory. 

Saints and Science

This review of The Lives of the Saints by Suzanne Paola appeared in The Women’s Review of Books Vol. 20, No. 12  (September 2003), 11. Suzanne Paola’s grim, visionary third book of poems speaks in multiple voices about morality, faith, nature, human nature, and science in the age of the Human Genome Project.

I Can’t Remember

By Priscilla Long This review of I Can’t Remember by Cynthia Macdonald appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 7 (April 1998), p. 7. The poems in Cynthia Macdonald’s disturbing, brilliant sixth book, I Can’t Remember, constitute acts of remembering. The poems remember what has been forgotten, repressed, put away. They remember – possibly they inflict – the traumas of childhood and of history, and they do so with  concrete images and unsettling immediacy.

The Poetics of Passion

By Priscilla Long This review of The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Vol 14, No. 5 (February 1997). The life of poetry, which Muriel Rukeyser first published in 1949, is a profoundly important book, and not only because Rukeyser was, as Jane Cooper puts it in her fine introduction, “One of the great, necessary poets of our country and century.” These essays speak about what poetry requires of poet and reader alike: a fully engaged imagination, the deepest possible connection to feeling, a willingness to attend to meanings, to engage with symbol and myth. “A poem does invite, it does require,” Rukeyser writes. “What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response.”