SOURCE: "New Poetry: The Generation of the Twenties," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 221, No. 2, February, 1968, pp. 141-42.

Early associated with the confessional school of poetry, Davison is an American poet whose first collection of verse, The Breaking of the Day (1964), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In the following excerpt, he finds Half Sun Half Sleep less successful than Swenson 's previous verse collections.

May Swenson, with Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, is one of the most meticulous poets writing today. In Half Sun Half Sleep she extends even further the formal cunning and sensuous resilience that characterized her selected poems, To Mix With Time. Her new work (apart from some expert translations from the Swedish) falls into three categories: observation of natural objects, games played with word transformation, and poems in shapes (always a favorite device of Miss Swenson's). The eye and the hand are...