Reviewed by Camille-Yvette Welsch

Let me start by expressing frustration with the current state of poetry—lots and lots of words, not a lot of meaning. I once had a professor who blinked over the top of her glasses at a student and deadpanned, “Can’t we all just agree to have meaning?” Yes, can’t we? Maxine Kumin manages to use those old handmaids—meaning, narrative, meter, sensible stanzas, clearly voiced images—to great effect. Indeed, the poems remember another great New England writer, Robert Frost, in whose poetry women lost children and marriages, barely teenage boys lost their hands and their lives. I speak of the Robert Frost unknown to guidance counselors, the one who shares with Kumin a mastery of sound and sense, the macabre pastoral and the moving lyric.

In this, her fifteenth book, Kumin, like Frost in his time, stays in the voice of the everywoman, except this everywoman gasses gophers and waxes poetic about manure. Here, she examines death and regret, chews them over coming up with a slightly different taste every time whether it is “Magda of Hospice House” who claims “I love my work as specialist in easement.// Now I am naturalized and marketable./ Death is the thing I know, its catch and gurgle” or the speaker writing about “Broody” a brood mare who dies in her stall, whose body must be chained and dragged out of the barn where “her gut had burst and left a fetid trail across the paddock.” Kumin, famous for her nature poems, respects the necessities of dying, eating, blooming, excretion, etc. She makes some sense of the world, even makes sense of regrets though she cannot change them. For instance, her feuding “grasping and roaring” brothers, now dead, appear repeatedly, still arguing. Kumin can’t bring them even metaphoric peace; she can only lament the stupidity of the lost bond.

For me, that recommends Kumin—there is something gimlet-eyed about her poems even as they urge us to be kinder, more sympathetic. In “The Jew Order” she writes of Grant’s order “expelling all Jews as a class from Union territory// in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys//within 24 hours of receipt of this command.” The little-known historical fact sneaks into a poem about a high school classroom, split by ethnicity and race. She imagines how the differences might have been bridged had the teacher revealed the story, and the intervention of Lincoln as a kind of national savior for both. But that moment of potential, as in so many of the poems’ narratives, is lost.

Though the subject matter can be funereal, the resulting poems are not. When Kumin writes about Judaism, she scores with fury. In “The Burners, The Buriers,” she tells of writers who burned their manuscripts, then of the Jews who had to smuggle words out, scratch them in soap, bury them in the ground. Kumin writes, “So little rescued for posterity:/ Everything I leave behind me, hold fast. Keep dry.” She writes of race, of national politics, and of summer evenings, “How pleasant the yellow butter/ melting on the white kernels, the meniscus/ of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets.” The poem acknowledges “Every year, the end of summer/ lazy and golden, invites grief and regret.” The end of this book will invite the same, regret that it has ended, grief that there are not more like it.