[To describe her poems as clever and skeptical] is not to say that Miss Swenson has no heart, but that she keeps it strictly under the discipline of her brain. "New & Selected Things Taking Place" is a title that in itself demonstrates a certain skepticism about poetry. Her poems are not poems, but "things taking place." They take place in a number of shapes and are subject to a few too many tricks for my taste, and yet there is no doubt that underneath the verbal fireworks lies a sophisticated seriousness. Poems about her mother and father, their lives, their deaths, eschew the self-preoccupation of their genre and manage to be witty and moving at the same time. Miss Swenson is also a fine ornithologist; her birds and landscapes are distinct enough to make an exile weak with homesickness…. [She] is something of a philosopher, though her point...