May Swenson Books

My introduction to May Swenson came when I recently met the person to whom all of her work has been bequeathed. I found May Swenson's work to be very accessible, which is not the "vogue" in poetry at the moment. Anyone can understand and be touched. Her childlike humor mixed with her sometimes profound subject matter makes this book a treasure trove of sweet, funny, heart-wrenching, fascinating poems that you'll want to flip in and out of over and over again. It has made me interested in the rest of her work and life.

Swenson is a master at pithy telling of the heart and the natural world. Her poetry is so open, so enjoyable to eat. You feel how much heart and insight she has, while reveling in her brevity and images.

Tim Siegel
Friends Wilderness (Retreat) Center
www.friendswilderness.org

Faith Shearin's debut book of poems tells a compelling story. The speaker in these poems begins as a child, becomes a childless wife and ,in a final transformation, finds herself a mother. The book is full of humor and wise observation. She describes her yearning for a child this way: "I hold nothing in my arms. The nothing feels light and heavy at the same time.." The stories these poems weave together are both particular and individual (a mother's untidy kitchen, a father's eccentric love for his dog) and wonderfully universal.

Winner of the May Swenson poetry award, The Owl Question by Faith Shearin is a unique collection of brief yet evocative verse, featuring a foreword by Mark Doty (an international poet and the appointed judge for the 2002 May Swenson Award). Examining adolescence, nature, femininity, parenthood, daily life, and more, these inspirational and deftly written verses often carry a down-to-earth, narrative-event tone. My father, in middle age, falls in love with a dog./He who kicked dogs in anger when I was a child,/who liked his comb always on the same shelf,/who drank martinis to make his mind quiet./He who worked and worked/- his shirts/wrapped in plastic, his heart ironed/like a collar./He who - like many men -/ loved his children but thought the money/he made for them was more important/than the rough tweed of his presence.

I don't know of any poet of the younger generation whose aims and voice are as distinctive as Lisa Williams'. A lot of poetry these days consists of naïve (or else ironic or heavily stylized and encrypted) self-expression, but Williams' best poems are often more like acts of the imagination in the seriously playful mode that Stevens perfected--they are poems "of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice," to use his phrase. Like Moore and Bishop, Williams pays intensely vivid and particularized homage to the things of the world in a voice that can be bracingly informal even when pushing the boundaries of currently accepted dictions and styles or when challenging the reader intellectually. At once enigmatic and evocative, speculative and lyrical, visionary and grounded, Williams' best poems manage to sound both carefully made and improvisatory. In an odd way they can sometimes seem akin to both formalist and "spoken word" currents in poetry today.

I'm glad to see on Amazon.com that Williams has a new book coming out in the spring. Among the ten or twelve new poems I've seen in magazines over the last few years have been several amazing meditations or imaginative riffs on subjects like sea creatures or the sun or cosmological phenomena, one or two very musical themes-and-variations (in the mode of Stevens' "Idea of Order at Key West," perhaps) and a handful of autobiographical poems--though even in those Williams never descends into the triviality or exhibitionism of confessional poetry.

My only complaint is that Ms. Williams has not put out another book of poetry since this fine collection, the winner of the May Swenson Award for a first-timer. Other readers seem to view her work as trite over-workshopped craftsmanship; it is precisely the qualities that they deride that make Ms. Williams' work stand out from the rest attempting to practice their craft today. Rather than becoming self-absorbed with the thought of oneself as a "poet" while sinking headfirst into a miasma of hackneyed cliches, Ms. Williams explores the world of culture and ideas while at the same time offering exceptional style and imagery. I was a contemporary of Ms. Williams' at UVA, though as a literary critic and not as a writer -- and have heard her read several times. She is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive readers of poetry I have heard, perhaps only eclipsed by W.D. Snodgrass and Derek Walcott. Judge for yourself -- if you are a student or lover of poetry, it is definitely worth you time to read this collection, and it should be available at almost any major university library.

*The Hammered Dulcimer* is proof that contemporary poets need not curb their desires to revel in the realm of ideas. In these poems the abstract becomes delightfully concrete--as, for example, when she shows the reader "the arrows of our fortune" pointing down "taut as a heron's foot" (in "The Direction of Shadow"). Lisa Williams' pitch, diction, and tone consistently soar to keep perfect pace with the ideas she explores. Meanwhile, her formal deftness--whether employing a subtle iambic line or ballad stanzas reminiscent of Scottish mystic Helen Adam--lends to each poem a music that is delightful to the ear. This is a collections I will turn to again and again--and I impatiently await Williams' next book.

Williams writes a "nice" line, her poems are tight and controlled - perhaps overly controlled. Unfortunately, I didn't find much here other than craftmanship. Her poems suffer from an all too common problem (these workshop days) of turning small speculations into universals, but lacking in detail, meat, heart, and experience. Williams may turn into a fine poet but if she doesn't get beyond the surface her work will remain glossy workshop ditties.

Lisa Williams studied under the instruction of Rita Dove and with other now well-known poets. But this book lacks the spark that is necessary to make a book fly. All of the poems are flat and too self-indulged that it makes them difficult to get throught at times. Sure she writes in trimeter and tetrameter and that takes skill, but past skill a writer needs something unique to set him/her apart from the vast field of other writers. The fact is that Williams hasn't found herself. Like a classically trained painter who cannot break free from what has so been instilled in him/her through years of instruction, Williams The Hammered Dulcimer lacks staying power. The poems remain monotonous and difficult to relate to. The language is not as fresh as it could be and the reader can definitely see that this book was, in fact, "hammered out" and didn't come naturally to the poet. This woman is smart, but not genius and there is no genius in her poetry. She is good at her craft, but anyone with a MFA from UVA will probably have his/her craft down fairly well. But she doesn't have the madness it takes to be truly inspirational, not to mention that her poems use traditional meter and employ traditional turns, if they employ any kind of turn at all. In short, there is little meaning and beauty in her poetry. She may not like the "jewelled" lines of late Victorian prosody, yet she had proved that even a hundred years later lyrical cliches still haunt the contemporary poet.

This lovely contest winner will speak to women as surely as poets have spoken to the author, Suzette Marie Bishop. And the poets do speak to her. Much of her work is inspired by the work of others. With an eye and pen for detail, readers looking for poetry with a delicate touch are certain to love Bishop's book.
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Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of two award-winning books, This is the Place and Harkening

This book was very good I think but it didn't tell everything it could have about her childhood. May Swenson has an interesting life and an interesting poems!

This book is a good tool for introducing poetry to children and sparking their interest. Afterall, all poets were kids once, and something got us interested in the craft.

This book is a great tool to use in order to promote higher order thinking skills in upper elementary and middle school students. It helps children to use their imaginations, and write with more descriptive language.

I'm not that much of a fan of Swenson's poetry, but I bought this book for my 6th grade writing classes and my rating is largely based upon their reactions to it. Before I ask the kids to write poetry, I try to allow them to read as much as possible. Since many 11-year-olds have little attraction to poetry, this book looked like an interesting addition with it's `puzzler' twist. This did not turn out to be the case. A fair number of students picked out the book, but few stuck with it. After some casual interviews of my students here's what might have been going on:

I think the `puzzler' element intrigued many kids but, ultimately, it just didn't have enough "oomph" for them. They were expecting "brain teasers" of a more logico-mathematical sort. Furthermore, Swenson's mature poetic language seems to have added a second level of challenge for them. Its not that these kids could never get beyond Shel Silverstein (on the contrary, many leapt toward the books with serious themes), but something about Swenson's Marianne-Moore'ish sparseness added complexity while subtracting words. The puzzles weren't puzzling enough and the poetry was a tad too poetic - for 11-year-olds. (For me too!)

It is pretty hard to find powerful poetry appropriate to the range of interests and capabilities of the young-adult. In poetry, as in life, they are sometimes stranded between kiddie-stuff and teen-angst stuff, neither of which define them so much of the time. This collection does offer something with a certain power and poetic universality, so I'd still suggest it for such a classroom (or family) collection as mine... and perhaps yours.

I really expected a lot out of this collection, but I found it to be rather weak as a whole. In fact, many of the poems were a stretch as to if I'd even call them love poems. "Because I Don't Know" stands out as both a great poem and a great love poem. But one of the other of the best poems "Strawberrying" is a stretch, I think, to call it a love poem, though there is some sensual imagery in it. I just thought that this collection would be better than what it is.