In Other Words

Considers Florida, birds, boats, the past, birthdays, childhood, photographs, friendship, the desert, the space shuttle, death, time, and the stars

Swenson's gift for immediacy turns a familiar scene into an act of discovery: "On wall-to-wall rugging the cars slouch by/ with headlights groping, windows blind/ the drivers invisible in the blizzard." In her first collection of poems since New and Selected Things Taking Place, she experiments with a variety of forms. In "Banyan," a long fable in verse and prose, a cockatoo escapes from the town library and encamps with a monkey in a banyan tree, and the two debate the meaning of life. The poet concocts an entire poem out of spoonerisms ("A Nosty Fright"); parodies advertising ("The Digital Wonder Watch"); and records the excitement and tragedy of Cape Canaveral space launches ("Shuttles"). Swenson rises to fierce eloquence in tributes to Elizabeth Bishop and Leonard Baskin. The most memorable poems grow out of her precise, careful observation of nature, whether she is picking strawberries or eyeing a pale December sun.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Whether Swenson is reliving the fatal Challenger liftoff or advising undergraduates (in her 1982 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem "Some Quadrangles"), her attention is fixed on this country's varied rhythms. The stylistic inventiveness, for which she is well known, is best represented here by a long fable that mixes verse and prose. In "Banyan" a Woolley Monkey rescues a talking cockatoo imprisoned in a cage and lives with it in an ancient banyan tree. Swenson, who holds a Bachelor of Science degree, has long been fascinated with plant and animal behavior. In "The Cross Spider" she imagines an insect's predicament as it tries to spin a web in Skylab's weightless space. Swenson's poetic landscape is replete with such "beasts and birds that speak and sing," an affinity she shares with the painter Henri Rousseau. Recommended for academic and public libraries. Lisa Mullenneaux, Iowa City, Ia.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.