SOURCE: "'Turned Back to the Wild by Love,'" in The New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1992.

In the following review, Hirsch offers a highly laudatory assessment of The Love Poems of May Swenson.

"Listen, there's just one 'Don't,' one 'Keep Off,' / one 'Keep Away From,' "May Swenson advised the graduating class in her 1982 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poem, "Some Quadrangles": "Don't be a clone." Whatever you do, she enjoined them, "make your own / moves. Go opposite, or upside down, or Odd." As a poet May Swenson, who died in 1989 at the age of 76, certainly took her own advice. She was an American original, and her poems—with their astonishing formal variety, their quirky visual shapes and incantatory rhythms, and their refreshingly odd, insightful observations about the natural world—stand by themselves in the ever-changing landscape of contemporary poetry. No one else could have created...