“Maureen Seaton is that rare thing: a poet’s poet (like Alice Notley, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Robert Hayden) and a poet for all of us (also like Notley, Bishop, Auden, Hayden), speaking for and to all of us about our shared human experience, speaking plainly and memorably, with silences followed by pyrotechnics, ordinary speech followed by the most celestial of music. After reading this collection, I began to read it again. And then again. And I’m not done. Will never be done. Mostly I feel astonished that I managed to survive this long without this voice, without these poems. They’re life-changing, but also life-sustaining, these meditations on that which cannot be comprehended in anything except poetry, by a poet who seems to have been brought to us to help us understand this. Maureen Seaton, in an act of artistic generosity and aesthetic near-perfection (since perfection would never be good enough for this poet), has given us Sweet World, shared a glimpse of exactly that which her title references with us, as she’s also allowed us to witness its apocalyptic destruction, to survive that, and then to watch as she rebuilds it before we’re done catching our breaths, the voice so incredibly funny and rueful and world-weary, but also so full of wisdom and transcendence. I haven’t read anything that moved and amazed me (all this play, and invention) and made me like poetry so much in a long, long, long time! Not forgettable, not for cowards, and not a poetry you want to leave this world, sweet or otherwise, without reading.”

Laura Kasischke