SOURCE: A review of A Cage of Spines, in Poetry, Vol. 94, 1959, pp. 189-91, 193-94.

In the following excerpt from a review of poetry collections by five different authors, Gibbs characterizes A Cage of Spines as the best of the five volumes, but notes that Swenson could have been "less cautious" in presenting more than superficial topics in her poems.

Here are five books of poetry [Swenson's A Cage of Spines, Donald Hall's The Dark Houses, Richard Lyons's One Squeaking Straw, Jon Silkin's The Two Freedoms, and John Heath-Stubbs's The Triumph of the Muse], one by a woman, four by men, two by British writers, three by American—beyond these banal facts there is very little to say about them as a group. The writers seem not to have been influenced by one another, and, in fact, to have widely different conceptions of what poetry is and what makes...