SOURCE: "Iconodule and Iconoclast," in Poetry, Vol. CXIX, No. 2, November, 1971, pp. 107-09.

Sullivan is an American educator, critic, and poet. In the following excerpt, she praises Iconographs: "These poems combine ecstasy with exactness, and speak the truth in truthful language. "

Iconographs has deliberate visual appeal. Certain poems have "typed shapes and frames invented for this collection", as May Swenson tells us in a note appended to the book. Later in that note she admits, "I have not meant the poems to depend upon, or depend from, their shapes or their frames; these were thought of only after the whole language structure and behavior was complete in each instance. What the poems say or show, their way of doing it with language, is the main thing."

These poems say or show a lot. The variety in the book is wide and rare, and because I am not used to...