"Swensen is psychopomp back to an orphic sense of voice, one the critic Elizabeth Sewell, in
The Orphic Voice
, describes as
...a kind of manual of language and mind as a dance of relations, moving and not static, which may help us forward
. That could serve as worthy blurb for
And And And
. Swensen is returning us to a kind of first poetics, a
prima poieia
, in which word and world are co-creative and mutually flourishing. Here language doesn't define, doesn't categorize, doesn't lay claim to fact or knowledge. What paltry things such certainties are against the ongoing mystery of the vital energy stitching one life to every other..."
-Dan Beachy-Quick