Maxine Kumin (1925–2014)

In The Long Marriage Maxine Kumin is keen to describe what she sees in the viewfinder of life. She stares down uncomfortable topics like suicide and crime with unflinching clarity. From the community of Grays Point to gardening to the struggle of rehabilitation after an accident. She even reflects on her own injuries from being thrown from a horse: punctured lung, eleven broken ribs, and a bruised liver...just to name a few. Her poems are life jumping off the page and, dare I say, into your show more heart.
Poems I enjoyed the most:
Skinny dipping with William Wordsworth - remembering her days as a Radcliffe student, studying Wordsworth. She paints a picture of a passionate youth and the aftermath of a romance long cooled by time and war.

Thinking of Gorki While Clearing a Trail - Who is Saturnine Gorki? 1929 International Congress of Atheists.

Imagining Marianne Moore in the Butterfly Garden - another beautiful tribute.

Capital Punishment - why are we allowed to see gruesome mutilations (the victims of Sierra Leone) and yet spared the benign execution of Benny Demps?

Rilke Revisited - another ode to a great writer.

Why There Will Always Be Thistle - I need to read this to my husband. He can't stand thistles.

Pantoum, with Sawn - ode to Helen of Troy

Calling out of Gray's Point - charming poem about Purvis, the phone repair man who has been trying to fix the line.

The Exchange - line I liked the best: "the neophyte animal psychic who visits my barn at midday"...okay.

Highway Hypothesis - imagining the neighbors. show less

The poet Maxine Kumin, toward the end of her life, writes a diverse book of poems, many of them formal, reflecting on the New Hampshire farmland, nature, politics, birds, horses, her dogs, and her unsettled relationship with old age and death (Getting There is a sonnet about atheists going to heaven. The last lines of Summer Meditation read, "If only death could be/ like going to the movies/ You get up afterward/ and go out/ saying, how was it?/ Tell me, tell me how was it?")

Some of her show more characters include an anorexic, a Slavic immigrant nursing aid, a rapist and and her dead father, who telephones her on a Sunday Morning: "Pop!" I say, "you're dead!...

She also doesn't shy away from political events. New Hampshire, Feb. 7, 2003 is set in a blizzard, as the poet waits for the Iraq war to begin and remembers the travesty of Vietnam. Another poem is titled On being Asked during a national crisis to write a poem in celebration of the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Appropriate Tools is an elegy and rant, a protest of our decreased liberties and how immigrants are treated — as piercing today as it was in 2005. Women & Horses is an ode to joy and life’s extravagances in the face of barbarity and darkness.

Well worth dipping into again and again. show less

Maxine Kumin seems like a sweet older woman. Harmless, it would appear. After all, she begins her book of poetry with a focus on nature, and makes insightful observations on little things that are often overlooked. For example, in "Lore", she talks about a book she's read about blue jays, and how many acorns they ingest each season. She describes the oak trees that result from the blue jays losses, but takes notice of an even more interesting thought: who is the person, "an aspiring Ph.D." show more that actually counts these and compiles such data? It's that little bit of twist, from observing nature to questioning a source that make her unique, and makes you realize this is not a simple collection of pretty words. Most of all, as you continue reading Where I Live, you see that she isn't as harmless as you might suspect.

Her topics vary greatly and her observations are often are anything but sweet. In talking about Iraq, she doesn't back away from revealing the discrepancies between the suffering caused by liberators and a religious leader claiming there is a "spiritual value of suffering". She concludes that the sun comes up, "staining the sky with indifference". She also contrasts the ideals of the Geneva Convention with vice-presidents and Supreme Court justices who engage in what she calls "canned hunting". In "Please Pay Attention as the Ethics Have Changed", she wonders what kind of Humane Society (a word play on "human" society) would permit such cruelty to an animal (or moreso, to a person). From Daniel Pearl's tragic death to contaminated drinking water, she reveals her heart in her words.

She also speaks of stray dogs and abandoned cats with great feeling, and you get the impression that it isn't simply the immediate sadness that she's getting at...she's driving at the attitudes that make people shut their heart up to others. And while sometimes we may stereotype a poet as distant and focused on things beyond real life, she shows she's firmly planted in the here and now. In "The Chambermaids in the Marriot in Midmorning", she finds another life in their chatter:

"Behind my "Do not disturb" sign I go wherever they go
sorely tried by their menfolk, their husbands, lovers or sons,
who have jobs or have lost them, who drink and run around,
who total their cars and are maimed, or lie idle in traction...

I think how static my life is with its careful speeches and classes
and how I admire the women who daily clean up my messes,
who are never done scrubbing..."

The contents are divided into sections: New Poems, Looking for Luck, Connecting the Dots, The Long Marriage, Jack and Other New Poems, and Still to Mow. Simple chores, farm work, famous women authors, childbirth, the Red Sox, misbehaving pets, redemption, corporate greed, and travel all are portrayed as she sees them, not sugar-coated nor politicized. The collection as a whole feels like a book of sage advice from a favored aunt-the feisty one-the one that sometimes says what you don't want to hear but who you listen to anyway. And while they are considered poetry, the verses often read with the detail you'd find in a short story. show less

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
“THIS is the story—I hope it's true‐/Of Speedy Horatio Alger LaRue/And the wonderful things he was able to do.” show more To call Speedy's accomplishments wonderful is an understatement, for he can dig like no other fictional 8‐yearold. Night after night, for a year, he digs from Pennsylvania clear through the earth to Tasmania, encountering problems all the way, not the least of which is the force of gravity.

Told in rollicking, witty rhyme, Maxine Kumin's story is delightfully absurd. And while enjoying unhackneyed fantasy, the reader will also learn something of subsurface geology.

Ezra Jack Keats's illustrations, in a successful and interesting combination of collage, drawng, and a few upside‐down pages, add to the fun. This is a book for any child who has ever attempted to reach China—or Tasmania—by toy shovel show less