May Swenson

First published in 1956, May Swenson's The Centaur remains one of her most popular and most anthologized poems. This is its first appearance as a picture book for children. In images bright and brisk and tangible, the poet re-creates the joy of riding a stick horse through a small-town summer. As her shape shifts from child to horse and back, we know exactly what she feels. Sherry Meidell's water-color illustrations perfectly convey the wit and beauty of May Swenson's poem. These are playful, satisfying images full of vitality and imagination. Meidell handles the joy of poem'sfantasy and the joy of its occasional naughtiness with equal success.

Collected here are the complete love poems of May Swenson -- poems full of kindness, of sensuousness, of gentle affection, of love satisfied. As Maxine Kumin writes in her foreword to this collection, "the majority of Swenson's love poems are human you-and-I poems, exquisitely tender and understated." Culled from Swenson's published poetry as well as from her unpublished manuscripts, the poems in this collection provide an intimate glimpse of one of the most beloved American poets of the twentieth century, "a poet of dazzling gifts" (Joyce Carol Oates).

Between 1950 and 1979, May Swenson and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged over 260 letters. Their letters have interested scholars of American poetry for the commentary they contain on important work that each poet was publishing at the time, but equally for what these letters reveal about the relationship between the two writers. In Dear Elizabeth, three letters and five poems from Swenson to Bishop, including an unfinished draft never published before, are gathered into one small volume with an insightful essay by scholar and poet Kirstin Hotelling Zona. This brief but intense collection offers a surprising and revealing glimpse of a complicated relationship between two very different women and very different poets, both of whom made unquestionably major contributions to American poetry of the twentieth century. During her long career, May published eleven volumes of poetry, as well as individual poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, Parnassus, The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and many other major journals and anthologies; she received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, along with Rockefeller, Ford, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellowships.

Made With Words collects prose by May Swenson (1919-89), whom critic and poet John Hollander has called "one of our few unquestionably major poets." Born in Logan, Utah, she spent most of her adult life living and writing in New York City. She was an editor for New Directions Paperbacks, and a writer-in-residence at numerous universities during the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout her long and illustrious career, Swenson produced nine volumes of verse, including New and Selected Things Taking Place and In Other Words: New Poems. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and received a multitude of grants and awards during her lifetime.Made with Words includes a rich assortment of Swenson's prose, including several short stories, by turns amusing, provocative, and poetic, and inextricably bound with her poetic oeuvre; a one-act play entitled The Floor, produced in New York in the mid-sixties; interviews and book reviews that shed light on Swenson's poetic development as well as her literary and artistic tastes; and finally, a collection of Swenson's letters to the poet Elizabeth Bishop that reveal the intricacies of three decades of their personal and professional relationship. The critical and biographical introduction provides an engaging glimpse into the creative life and prose work of an important contemporary American poet.Gardner McFall is Assistant Professor of Literature, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She is the author of The Pilot's Daughter; Naming the Animals; and Jonathan's Cloud.

An International Poetry Forum Selection, translated from the Swedish by May Swenson with Leif Sjöberg.Tomas Tranströmer 2011 Nobel Laureate in Literature“Tomas Tranströmer, who is today one of Sweden’s most distinguished poets . . . can compare Lake Malar at dawn with a blue lamp, the islands creeping over the grass like nocturnal butterflies.”—New York Times