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

In the following essay, Russell compares Swenson to other women poets such as Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Emily Dickinson and considers Swenson's refusal of the label "lesbian poet. "

May Swenson, who died in 1989 at the age of seventysix, 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...