In Other Words

by May Swenson

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

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Anna Thilda May "May" Swenson was born in Logan, Utah to Swedish immigrant parents—and she grew up speaking Swedish at home. Swenson earned a BA from Utah State University and briefly worked as a reporter in Salt Lake City. She moved to New York City in the 1930s. Swenson is considered one of mid-twentieth-century America’s foremost poets.

Swenson’s poetry was widely praised for its precise and beguiling imagery, and for the quality of its personal and imaginative observations. Swenson’s ability to draw out the metaphysical implications of the material world were widely commented on; but she was also known for her lighthearted, even joyous, take on life.

Swenson left New York City in 1967, when she moved to Sea Cliff, Long Island where she lived with her partner, the author R.R. Knudson. During her prolific career, Swenson received numerous literary awards and nominations for her poetry. She taught and served as poet-in-residence at many institutions in both the United States and Canada, and she held fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, the Bollingen Prize, and Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She received an honorary degree from Utah State University as well as their Distinguished Service Gold Medal. Swenson was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1980-1989.

-- from The Poetry Foundation

Reviews

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Swenson’s style is excellent in rhythm and descriptive language.

I will remember the ekphrastic poem on Leonard Baskin.

I liked best her ‘a new pair,’ least her ‘comic’ or lighter poems though the digital watch poem is oddly prescient.

The final poem stands out as well. Banyan is a long narrative piece about life inside the labyrinth of a Banyan tree. It resembles the world within the book Piranesi by Susanna Clarke that I also recently read.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Swenson is a poet of the visual. She sees in words more than any other poet that I’ve read. That is not to say the language doesn’t contain wordplay…it does. The point is that Swenson doesn’t focus on structure, although she toys with it endlessly. She also uses multiple illusions, references, and lyricism endlessly. However, when I read her poems I am not struck predominantly by these things…I’m struck by the fact that I can see her subject matter. It is the matter of everyday – nature, certain people, certain situations. A great example is the very visual “Three White Vases”:
A Sunday in June. tippily until,
The water’s clear taken in charge
cornflower blue, by tiller and rein,
the sky its mirror. the spunky scraps

Distinctly clear of sails snap tight
the opposite coast, and slant on the wind.
its chalky sands A speedboat scampers
and miniature pavilions. arcs of white spray,

A flock of yachts, a white pontoon plane
midwater, distant, putt-putts, puts down
spins. Near shore, into choppy furrows
under my eye, of the bay.

the waves are dark Uniquely bright,
blue, mussel-dyed, the light today
where kids on a raft reveals the scene
teeter, splash, and as through a pane

dive. Slippery bodies that’s squeegee-clean.
climb up into sun White as the white
on the hot white planks. catamarans bobbing,
Agile little hips gulls on black-tipped

All wear different- wings skids over.
Colored stripes. My eye follows
As do the dinky to where they land.
Sunfish setting out on a lonely, reedy patch

of sand I see three The parents, that pair
white vases stand, of snowies, had a nest
each differently shaped: in the eelgrass
one upright neck, all spring. The third

one hunched, the third bird, the whitest,
with neck downcurved. is their child,
Each fixed eye, intent, looks like a bud vase,
watches what flinches that long neck.

just under waveskin: I see him
big school of tiny unhinge his slim
glinting baitfish bill, wilt his neck.
spread on the bay. I see the white

snaky throat
of the young egret
capably squirm
a blade-thin fish down.

The mastery of the visual is nowhere more evident than in her poetic obituary to Elizabeth Bishop, a poet of similar inclination, in “In the Bodies of Words” on page 56:
Tips of the reeds silver in sunlight. A cold wind
sways them, it hisses through quills of the pines.
Sky is clearest blue because so cold. Birds drop down
in the dappled yard: white breast of nuthatch, slate
catbird, cardinal the color of blude.

Until today in Delaware, Elizabeth, I didn’t know
you died in Boston a week ago. How can it be
you went from the world without my knowing?
Your body turned to ash before I knew. Why was there
no tremor of the ground or air? No lightning flick
between our nerves? How can I believe? How grieve?

I walk the shore. Scraped hard as a floor by wind.
Screams of terns. Smash of heavy waves. Wind rips
the courners of my eyes. Salty streams freeze on my face.
A life is little as a dropped feather. Or split shell
tossed ashore, lost under sand….But vision lives!
Vision, potent, regenerative, lives in bodies of words.
Your vision lives, Elizabeth, your words
from lip to lip perpetuated.

Two days have passed. Enough time, I think, for death
to be over. As if your death were not before my knowing.
For a moment I jump back to when all was well and ordinary.
Today I could phone to Boston, say Hello….Oh, no!
Time’s tape runs forward only. There is no replay.

Light hurts. Yet the sky is dull today. I walk the shore.
I meet a red retriever, young, eager, galloping
out of the surf. At first I do not notice his impairment.
His right hind leg is missing. Omens….
I thought I saw a rabbit in the yard this morning.
It was a squirrel, its tail torn off. Distortions….

Ocean is gray again today, old and creased aluminum
without sheen. Nothing to see on that expanse.
Except, far out, low over sluggish waves, a long
clotted black string of cormorants trails south.
Fog-gray rags of foam swell in scallops up the beach,
there outlines traced by a troupe of pipers—
your pipers, Elizabeth!—their racing legs like spokes
of tiny wire wheels.

Faintly the flying string can still be seen.
It swerves, lowers, touching the farthest tips of waves.
Now it veers, appears to shorten, points straight out.
It slips behind the horizon. Vanished.

But vision lives, Elizabeth. Your vision multiplies,
is magnified in the bodies of words.
Not vanished, your vision lives from eye to eye,
your words from lip to lip perpetuated.

“Some Quadrangles” is a wonderful poem, at times beautiful, irreverent, and wistful, was written during Swenson’s time at college. It provides an unforgettable image of Harvard, inside the minds of the students and also without.

The collections end on a philosophical note, and it is the perfect summing up. In the poem, Blondi the cockatoo sings:
The purpose of life is
To find the purpose of life
To find the purpose
Of life is
The purpose
Life is
To find

This is a wonderfully original volume of poetry.

[Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of May Swenson's poetry, many of which are simply lovely. I enjoy her fresh use of imagery and metaphor and her natural and ornithological themes. I also enjoy her otherwise ordinary subject matter.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 S974in 1987