A Daughter's Latitude: New & Selected Poems

The "sheets renewed for love or loneliness," are in a laundry but follow the poet back to her craft, where "I attempt to iron/ truisms shabby as the sheets of love/ or turn the frayed collar of a thought/ ... to make, one more time, the fabric hold." It's a telling and rare confession for a poet whose life and work are more often "adventures told with grace," more odyssey from Fargo, ND, to Nepal by way of Brooklyn, difficult parents and lovers, motherhood and cross-country travels solo, than pressing concerns of style. But her Utah highways, Perfume River in Vietnam, and view of two trees in Kathmandu, one full of egrets and the other hung with bats, are meditations as sure as Ignatian exercises. Occasionally the sibylline nods, turns oblique though often as not the reader is by then complicit in some guilty sensuality, some pleasure of the perfectly rendered particular. Swenson is the 1993 National Poetry Series winner for The Landlady in Bangkok. This book collects works from her four books and arranges them with previously uncollected poems in order, by decades, from the 60s through the 90s. The domestic and the foreign recur, as in a poem about her son at fifteen, whose other natural mother "roughs your lip with a sooty smudge,/ casts your features to her ambition,/ and molds you anew to her necessity,/ while your cheeks are still soft with my child." The captains of his soul, "Hook to Kirk to Ahab," mature, as, "Landlocked in my life,/ I wave a Quaker handkerchief from the dock,/ knowing the ship you set out in/ has no oars, leaks,/ is lost in space./ But sea and stars are still the same/ where wonder looms a white blindness." Which would be incomplete without words that shake from themselves the fleeting image of an accused in the dock, vagaries of sounds fitting misgivings past and future. This is the perspective and precision we should expect from anyone self-deprecatingly described in "us, the Sapphos,/ blue-stockinged office temporaries/ wearing our ink like eyeshadow.