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. Nature: Poems Old and New contains 183 poems selected and ordered to emphasize her affinity to the out-of-doors. The poems are lush, delicious, witty, at times trite, at times deeply philosophical.
Swenson was an unrelentingly lyrical poet, a master of the poetic line in which near sounds accumulate and resonate so that the poem exists (beyond its meanings) as a rattle or a music box or, in moments of greatness, a symphony. Consider “The Beauty of the Head,” a poem on the under-explored subject of defecation:
….Lake is our bathtub, dish-sink,
drinking jug, and (since the boat’s head doesn’t work
—the ice box, either—the bilge pump barely)
lake is water closet, too. Little I knew
a gale this night would wash, and then
wind-wipe my rump hung over the rail. (p. 37)
Listen to the jingle of short “i’s” in dish-sink and drinking. Note the thrubbing of short “u’s” in tub, jug, pump, rump, hung. Mind the alliterative whooshing of water, wash, and wind-wipe.
Musicality informs nearly every line of every poem. It is grounded in Swenson’s formidable powers of observation that in certain poems reach breathtaking virtuosity. In “Look Closer,” description mounts to revelation as the chant “look closer” prompts another look at one particular plant. In a long build, impossible to convey in a single stanza, the poem begins to resonate with the sexuality of nature itself:
Look closer. By April, at the hub of each wheel
of petals a green knob swells, erects a hairlike
stem with infant leaf attached. It’s pale green.
Meanwhile some older, larger leaves have reddened.
As flimsy petals shrink, young leaves of like size
high on the stems turn red. Or were they petals
that transposed to green? It seems that leaves
and flowers crave to impersonate each other. (p. 191)
I once heard a very good poet remark that a poet’s strongest attribute may also be her weakest. Swenson’s musicality and her observational gifts give us her slight poems as well as her great ones. Swenson’s least memorable poems are skillfully designed trinkets that don’t reach beyond the observed to attain the metaphorical transformations of her greatest work. The literal, surface level of meaning is the only meaning. “October Textures” are October textures, nothing more: “The brushy and hairy,/tassely and slippery….” I did not want “I want the fluffy stuff to keep coming down” (“The Fluffy Stuff”).
Perhaps a great poem requires a great subject, some quintessential conflict “The Snowy” addresses an owl in a zoo hunched on its “cement crag, black talons just showing.” Building on the longer, more expansive line of Swenson’s most metaphorically resonant work, the poem gains in descriptive power until the owl seems to represent wild nature itself, enraged, trapped in the small cement cell humankind has designed for it:
….Elemental form simplified as an egg,
you held perfectly still on your artificial perch. You, too,
might be a crafty fake, stuffed or carved. Except your eyes.
enormous, yellow circles containing black circles, clear, slick,
heartstopping double barrels of concentrated rage pointed at me. (p. 110)
Perhaps a fourth of Swenson’s published oeuvre contains imagery unrelated to the natural world and happily, her compilers have included a few here. “Feel Me,” perhaps her greatest poem, certainly one of our greatest poems, explores a father’s enigmatic dying words, “Feel me to do right.” The poem simultaneously sinks and expands through layers of possible meanings.
….Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt
through some aperture….
Or was it merely his apology
for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying,
as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide
gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me
to wait here, with the worms!'”
The speculations on “our dad’s” last loaded words continue until we arrive at the spectacular epiphany.
In the process of shaping a book, poets typically order and reorder their poems until the book becomes a macro-artform with the poems elaborating, contradicting, and mirroring one another much as stanzas interact in a single poem. I would have appreciated some insight into the procedures and problems of doing this in the absence of the poet, and I also felt the need of a critical overview of Swenson’s career. In the midst of writing this review I learned from another source that Swenson had composed some 900 poems, that despite her many honors, only something like half her work has so far been published. (Grace Schulman, “Life’s Miracles: The Poetry of May Swenson,” American Poetry Review, Vol. 23, No. 5 (Sept/Oct 1994). As Houghton Mifflin continues the vital mission of keeping Swenson in print, I hope the editors will consider sharing important information like this with her readers.
R. Knudson and Peter Davison (who are not identified) selected and ordered the poems topically in sections titled “Frontispieces,” “Selves,” “Days,” and so on. I found some of their choices to be pedestrian. Should a poet’s 20 bird poems written over a fifty-year period be gathered into a section titled “Feathers”? Doing so requires surrounding strong poems like “The Snowy” with slight poems that are also replete with beaks and cheeps. Grouping poems by image type—comets and moons under “Heavens”; waves and whales under “Waters”—highlights the obvious and produces an unnecessary glut of similar images.
The method of presentation caused me, at some point deep in these poems, to begin suffering from an overdose of petals and clouds.
More intelligently designed groupings might have focused attention on her larger philosophical concerns—perception itself, the nature of identity, the relationship between subject and object.
In fact, the compilers shaped the most numinous section, “Selves,” to do exactly this. The section calls attention to Swenson’s metaphorical reach by grouping diverse poems that explore the boundaries of identity. In “Centaur,” Swenson’s famous poem about girlhood, the malleable boundaries of the self allow girl and horse to fuse: “My forelock swung in my eyes,/my neck arched and I snorted.” Identity (gender?) is also the subject of the long and psychologically acute “Bleeding.” The poem portrays an interaction between a sadistic knife-type and a submissive wound-type:
Stop bleeding said the knife.
I would if I could said the cut.
Stop bleeding You make me messy with this blood.
I’m sorry said the cut.
Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife
Don’t said the cut…. (p. 64)
This concrete poem—the caesura in each line makes a visual image of a jagged cut—is one of several that illustrate Swenson’s lifelong interest in typographical experiments.
Swenson’s vision of the natural world establishes how much we are part of it, whether we like it or know it or not. In “Motherhood” the mother
…twitched some chin-hairs
with pain or pleasure,
as the baby-mouth found and
yanked at her nipple;
its pink-nailed jointless
fingers, wandering her face….” (p. 155)
It is only slowly that the reader comes to realize that this deeply attached pair are not human but primates of the more hairy kind. The sex in the deliciously erotic poem “A Couple” (“He scrubs himself in her creamy folds….burrows/to her dewy shadows.”) transpires between a bee and a flower.
This master of observation puts observation itself under her microscope. “Sleeping Overnight on the Shore” explores perception and its distortions: “Intermittent moon/that we say climbs/or sets, circles only.” The poet’s eye can see from the eye of an insect—”Am I sitting on your wrist, someone immense?” (“Alternate Hosts”)—or from the moon where “there shines earth light/as moonlight shines upon the earth” (“Landing on the Moon”).
As Swenson knew, we are in the process of destroying the world of plants on which we depend for food and air. The annual destruction of dozens of species amounts to an ongoing, low-grade, full-scale catastrophe. In the world of Swenson’s poetry, we look at these plants, these animals, from an eye that sees them on their own terms. We see what we stand to lose from “steam shovel, bulldozer, cement mixer/rumbling over sand….”:
….
There’ll be a hotdog stand, flush toilets, trash–
plastic and glass, greasy cartons, crushed beercans,
barrels of garbage for water rats to pick through.
So, goodbye, goldeneye, and grebe and scaup and loon.
Goodbye, morning walks beside the tide tinkling
among clean pebbles, blue mussel shells and snail
shells that look like staring eyeballs. Goodbye,
kingfisher, little green, black-crowned heron,
snowy egret. And, goodbye, oh faithful pair of
swans that used to glide–god and goddess
shapes of purity–over the wide water. (p. 118)
Forget my quibbles about selection and arrangement. The poems themselves are every reason to own this book, and to treasure it.