Most humanists show very little curiosity about the physical world outside the self, and usually a positive antipathy to the mental processes we call scientific…. Science will not go away because poets ignore it, and in fact we ignore any great human enterprise at our peril. Yet few poets presently venture beyond dread or annoyance toward the works and ways of physics, chemistry, biology, and fewer bring back more than a gimcrack souvenir or two….

[May Swenson] is known as a nature poet, "one of the few good poets who write good poems about nature … not just comparing it to states of mind or society," as Elizabeth Bishop has remarked. You can easily cull a bestiary from her work … and always with a wondering, curious eye, an intense concern about the structure and texture of her subject, an extraordinary tactility…. She watches things over long periods, and tracks...