Reviews & Interviews
Driving to the Bees by Maggie Schwed
Galatea Resurrects #24, May 2, 2015
A review by Eileen Tabios
“Maggie Schwed’s poems in Driving to the Bees are simply lovely. Its language is fresh and refreshes. Many are lyrical gems. But the quality that most struck me while reading through the book is their presence. Presence.
And presence was as necessary as Schwed’s poetic language in creating these poems particularly because of their subject: farm life. To read her poems is to be elevated beyond the specific narratives, yet the specificity of the narratives help lead to a fulsome resonance appreciated by the receptive reader.”
Maggie Schwed on “Pollen Season”
Beloit Poetry Journal Poet’s Forum, July 1, 2013
“It was Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma that made me feel, eight years ago, that my love of farms didn’t have to starve itself by merely driving past the silos, beautiful patterned fields, broad barns, and rusting tractors of the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast.”
Pollen Season [link to PDF], Beloit Poetry Journal Summer 2013
To Convert that Terrible Fact into Beauty:
Allison Blythe in Conversation with Maggie Schwed
The Malahat Review, 2011
Maggie Schwed talks with Malahat volunteer Allison Blythe about “The Constant Gardener” (#175, Summer 2011)
If the Muse is Kind:
Linda Rogers in Conversation with Maggie Schwed
The Malahat Review, 2011
Maggie Schwed’s “The Constant Gardener” was one of two winners of our 2011 Long Poem Prize. Malahat advisory board member Linda Rogers spoke with her about life post-win.
The Malahat Review: 2011 Long Poem Prize Winner
“Of Maggie Schwed’s “The Constant Gardener,” the judges said “[the poem] moves back and forth between mythical time and ordinary time as it meditates on mortality, grief, and filial love. The seasonal challenges in the garden, and the last, difficult season in a man’s life, are central to this earthy and wise sequence of poems.”
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