"What Swenson responds to and values in the world, its essential freedom," writes Susan Mitchell in her foreword to Nature, "is the very quality that is most striking in her as a poet. ... This is a world looked at through love, through generosity of spirit." Nature, the first major compendium of May Swenson's poems in a decade, concentrates on 182 magnificent nature poems drawn from nearly fifty years of work. Swenson, who died in 1989, ranks among the foremost poets of this century; she is certainly one of the most sensuous and joyful and has a huge following.
The special quality of Swenson's work has won her love and praise from all schools of poetry. "Surely no one, scientist or poet," wrote poet laureate Howard Nemerov, "has seen things ... so clearly as she, and surely no one has made seeing and saying so nearly one." Her visions, though idiosyncratic, appeal to every kind of viewer. In this wonderful collection, the reader will find poems in rhyme and out of it, poems in odd shapes and forms, poems of praise and observation and sensuous delight. They gather themselves under rubrics of the natural world: Frontispieces, Selves, Days, Feathers, Makings, Instincts, Heavens, Visions, Waters, and an Afterpiece. To enter the ocean of these poems is to enter the ocean of the self, a self that feels itself at one with the natural world.
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