Selected Poems: 1960-1990.
St. Andrews, B.A.
Maxine Kumin. New York. Norton. 1997. 294 pages. $27.50. ISBN 0-393-04073-9.
Back in the good old days when Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize
for Up Country (1973), being a nature poet was almost to be expected for
females. In fact, nature imagery has served not only Emily Dickinson but
every other modern poet from Robinson Jeffers to Mary Oliver. Yet Kumin
was, even back then, more than the usual categorical imperatives: New
England farmer, naturalist, Jewish-American, woman poet.
To put this simply, Maxine Kumin is and has long been a writer's
writer, composing not only a dozen books of poetry (the most recent of
which is Connecting the Dots, 1997) but also four novels and a new prose
collection, Women, Animals, and Vegetables: Essays & Stories. The
Pulitzer and other honors including the Aiken/Taylor Award for Modern
Poetry, attest to the fact that Kumin has added a dimension to the
relationship between humans and creatures: some precision, some
unexpected juxtapositions, some honed edge to the usual animistic
reverence.
For one thing, her poems counterpointed soil and spirit in oddly
vivid and informing phrases. In her poem to a root cellar (selected from
House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate) "parsnips, those rabbis / have
braided their beards together / to examine the text. The word / that
engrosses them is: February."
The honors she has received (being appointed Consultant to the
Library of Congress, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and
New Hampshire Poet Laureate) affirm her keen-eyed, unsentimentalized
kinship with the world of gassed woodchucks and "the language of
April." Kumin is indeed a nature poet. And so much more. When she
first went off to farm horses in the 1970s, readers and critics had yet
to realize fully just how frail Earth's ecosystem was and how
prophetic and elegiac the cautionary voices of poets like Maxine Kumin
were becoming.
She has remained alert, aware of the flowering green line that leads
us all back to Thoreau, back to our uncles and lost mothers and
comrades. In "Apostrophe to a Dead Friend" she explains aging
and a surcease of sexual sorrows to one who died too young to know or
accept the fuller facts of life: "that men have grown smaller,
drier, / easier to refuse. / Passion subsides like a sunset."
One hears neither disenchantment nor romanticism in the poems of
Maxine Kumin. Her poems of life, of Earth and its creatures are not
spells cast in a fairy kingdom. Rather, her creative landscape is a
solid, sacred place where the rituals of life, love, and death are
performed purely: "Even knowing / that none of us can catch up . .
. / we are making a run / for it. Love, we are making a run."
Reading Kumin's Selected Poems 1960-1990 constitutes an act of pure
connection.
B. A. St. Andrews SUNY Health Science Center, Syracuse
