SOURCE: "A Mysterious and Lavish Power: How Things Continue to Take Place in the Work of May Swenson," in Kenyon Review, Vol. XVI, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 128-39.

In the following essay, Russell examines Swenson's poetry, focusing on the author's approach to and treatment of lesbian themes.

May Swenson, who died in 1989 at the age of seventy-six, was a lover of riddles. She liked to write them as well as to solve them—the harder the better. Like the riddle poems she assembled in two books for young readers, all her poems have the capacity to tease and delight. "A poem is a thing," Swenson tells us in her introduction to one of these collections, More Poems to Solve (1972). Often based on intricate mechanisms that are not easily replicated, Swenson's poems seem more to have been constructed than composed. Excerpting them is an extreme disservice, as it limits the...