May Out West: Poems of May Swenson by May Swenson, and: Nature: Poems Old and New by May Swenson (review)

270 Western American Literature in the ruins of Apollo’s temple trying to put the Sacred Way into focus as the guard blew his whistle over and over to wave her off. In “Music in the Air,” he overhears one drunk say to another: “John isn’t that where you were sick last night?” “Yes and I was sick over there once and over there.” The most refreshing characteristic of this collection is that it does not, for the most part, partake of the modem poetic trend toward cynicism. Almon is a poet who delights in life, who writes poetry that sings its praises rather than bemoans its insufficiencies. CHARLOTTE M. WRIGHT University of North Texas Press May Out West: Poems of May Swenson. By May Swenson. Selected and arranged by R. R. Knudson. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996. 64 pages, $15.95.) Nature: Poems Old and New. By May Swenson. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 240 pages, $17.95.) The latest two books released by the late Utah poet May Swenson remind us of the scope and the precision of her gift. They are treasures for the Swenson enthusiast as well as for the general reader. May Out West would be a starting place for readers new to Swenson’s work. A carefully selected and beautifully presented edition of thirty-four poems, it contains two previously unpublished: “The Seed of My Father” and “White Moon.” This book is not just for Westerners, though they will relish the portrait of our landscape it offers: it is for all who value their connection with the earth that sustains us. Reading through these poems, one is struck by the vastness of her poetic project, her deeply-felt and clearly expressed attachment with the world. She does not just admire nature, she becomes an integral part of it in a Whitmanesque integration of self and world. In “The Seed of My Father,” the poet’s father gives her the moon, a peach tree, the sun, and seeds, and they become the essence of her art. In “White Moon,” the narrator’s thoughts are not like snow, they are snow. Nature’s very richness was for her an inexhaustible source: the cumulus clouds, the willow sticks that became her horses, the west- Reviews 271 em tanager above Bear Lake, the varied saguaros, all are grist for her magical mill. Nature, larger and even more varied, reveals that Swenson is not just a regional poet, but a universal one. This collection contains ten previously unpublished poems, dated from 1952 to 1984. It is arranged in graceful themat­ ic units and has a useful index, containing dates for the poems. Of the new poems, “Incantation,” written in 1952, reveals the power of a mature poet with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s command of words and sprung rhythms, particularly the penultimate stanza: Burning snow spin me so with black sea to braided be In green sleep eons leap from gray slime past thought and time to pith and power to bathe in the immortal hour to breathe from another pulsing flower Occasionally her world seems almost too perfect: in “Camping in Madera Canyon,” for example, we wish for an occasional mosquito. This is a book of surprises. Of all the fine twentieth-century western writ­ ers, it is Swenson who has most clearly moved from region to eternity. In the tra­ dition of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Bishop, she merges the human with the physical world in almost seamless fashion. Hers is a baroque world, sometimes more visually than aurally successful. Her poems arranged for the page, as “How Everything Happens (Based on the Study of a Wave),” while clever, are perhaps not as successful as her more lyrical, musical poems, like “Still Turning.” But the reader must take her slowly, poem by poem, as there will be some­ thing to please every taste in this all-encompassing collection. One, “Water Picture,” is almost perfect in its conflation of art and nature as Swenson takes a Monet-like view of the pond in the park, where “all things are doubled” and the swan, kissing herself, makes the scene troubled: “water-windows splinter,/ treelimbs tangle, the bridge/ folds like...