Maxine Kumin has long been a favorite of mine for her steady eye on what it means to be human in a natural world. She is honest and yet hopeful about human relationships in the face of cruelty and death. In these poems she studies the headlines and brings disasters into her kitchen and garden even as she heals from her own injuries. Her death nearly a year ago is still a great loss. ( )

A couple of evenings ago I read a significant part of The Long Marriage: Poems by Maxine Kumin, a volume I picked up at a library sale. Kumin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives here in New England, and there is much of the countryside and rural living in her poetry. Some of what this volume contains is tributes to various other literary persons (if tributes is the right word here) and also a few poems written after her near fatal accident in 1998. Here's an excerpt from her "Skinnydipping with William Wordsworth"
-----
I lie by the pond in utter nakedness
thinking of you, Will, your epiphanies
of woodcock, raven, rills, and craggy steeps,
the solace that seductive nature bore,
and how in my late teens I came to you
with other Radcliffe pagans suckled in
a creed outworn, declaiming whole swatches
of "Intimations" to each other.
-----
There is also "Thinking of Gorki While Clearing a Trail" and "Imaging Marianne Moore in the Butterfly Garden" and three poems about Anne Sexton (who was Kumin's friend) and more.

I liked the poem, "Why There Will Always Be Thistle"

Here is an excerpt from the last stanza:

Bright little bursts of
chrome yellow explode from
the thistle in autumn
when goldfinches gorge on
the seeds of its flower.
The ones left uneaten
dry up and pop open
and parachutes carry
their procreant power
to disparate venues....

There is so much more in this volume then what I have mentioned.