[May Swenson's New and Selected Things Taking Place] is obviously meant to stand as a capstone to her career as a poet. Sixty poems come from the years since 1970, but the larger part of the book is a selection from five previous books of poems. We can thus, with New and Selected Things Taking Place, come to a full appreciation of her poetic goals and methods.

I think I might call May Swenson a meditative poet. However, it is the character of her meditations that ought to be distinguished here, however briefly. To do that, it may be useful to place her in the history of a certain kind of poetry during the 20th Century; that is, a kind of poetry [Imagism] that claimed attention during the first thirty years of this century…. The Imagist poets aimed at simplifying syntax, eliminating verbiage and thus getting rid of a...