Sentimental Standards

This third collection of McMahon's poems reconfirms her position among the most promising poets of her generation, a status reinforced this spring by her major award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She has a genius for making sense, and poetry, of the ordinary, for "transforming the least promising dross into aspects for intricate contemplation"; or, as G. E. Murray put it in The Southern Review, "Perhaps 'rear-ranging molecules' of thought and language is the best way to describe how she uses the unconscious to grab the reader's attention." Hers is a large and promising talent.