SOURCE: "Poetic Voices," in Partisan Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 3, Summer, 1991, pp. 565-69.

Collier is an American poet, educator, and critic. In the following excerpt, he admires the outlook expressed in In Other Words.

The familiar voice in May Swenson's In Other Words: New Poems speaks with a naturalist's love for the variety and particularity of the world. In poems that take great delight in discovering the shapes and associations hidden in the natural world, Swenson pays homage to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, yet her poems are quirkier, more playful and more celebratory than her two precursors. In "Three White Vases," Swenson suggests that the act of making a metaphor precedes the act of description so that the three white egrets she sees "On a lonely, reedy patch / of sand" are first vases, "each differently shaped." By such perceptions Swenson leads us from the surprises inherent in the...