SOURCE: "Spines and Other Worlds," in The Village Voice, Vol. IV, No. 2, November 5, 1958, p. 12.

Hentoff is an American novelist and critic. His nonfiction and young adult fiction reflect his passions for jazz, literature, and civil rights. In the following excerpt, he offers a favorable review of A Cage of Spines.

In A Cage of Spines May Swenson continues to indicate she's a poet with an eye that cuts into essences and an ear for song, although the melodies are still rather constricted. It is as if one were listening to an intensely sensitive flutist (and a flutist certainly can be moving) with the cello solos still to come. I mean further that she does not yet—with some exceptions—plunge into the joy and pain of being with Roethke's wholeness of naked song. But perhaps she doesn't want to, and it is usually bootless to compare one artist...