SOURCE: "Poetry in Review," in The Yale Review, Vol. 83, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 121-41.

In the following excerpt, Hammer extols the lyricism of Swenson's poems in the posthumous collection Nature.

May Swenson's Nature collects most of the major work of a master poet. The book's full title is Nature: Poems Old and New, and all of the poems in it in some way concern Swenson's great, lifelong subject, nature. The new poems include ten published for the first time and nineteen published for the first time in book form, perhaps as many as five of which are important additions to Swenson's achievement. The old poems include much of Swenson's New and Selected Things Taking Place (now long out of print), a few poems from In Other Words (the final book Swenson published before her death in 1989), and a selection from two posthumous volumes. Nature lacks the clarity of a...