The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson

Book excerpt: 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 Culled from Swenson's published poetry as well as from her unpublished manuscripts, the poems in this collection provide an intimate glimpse of one of the most beloved American poets of the twentieth century, "a poet of dazzling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).