SOURCE: A review of The Complete Poems to Solve, in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. LXIX, No. 3, May/June, 1993, p. 341.

The following review offers a highly favorable assessment of The Complete Poems to Solve.

Included in this volume are seventy-two poems for young readers, many of which appeared in Poems to Solve. In addition to several riddle poems, the collection contains a variety of verses that are evidence of the scope of Swenson's imaginative powers and verbal skills. Examples of her shaped poems, in which the placement of the words on the page suggests the subject, are represented by "Of Rounds" and "How Everything Happens (Based on a Study of the Wave)," two of her more accessible and most frequently anthologized works. This gifted poet asks much of her young readers. As she says in her introduction, "The identity or significance of what's inside [a poem] may be...