Reviewed by Joanna Pearson
9.11.07

In her sixteenth collection of poetry, Maxine Kumin still has a sharp eye for the natural world, just as we’ve come to expect from her, but she’s also turned to address darker themes. Torture, war, inequity, and national identity all come to bear in Still to Mow, a book marked by Kumin’s distress with current political events. This is also a collection of poetry by a self-consciously older poet, and in it, Kumin also confronts the realities of aging and death. Thus Still to Mow falls onto the graver side of the thematic spectrum, but in its elegantly constructed poems still serve to confirm Kumin as a fine poet, one worth of the Pulitzer, Ruth Lilly Prize, and multiple other literary honors she’s already received.

Still to Mow is divided into four sections, each of which is marked by a predominant concern. The first section, “Landscapes,” provides both a loosely gathered seasonal assortment of poems, but it also, from the very opening poem, forebodes Kumin’s concerns to come. “Mulching” describes the poet out in her garden on bended knee laying out old newspapers, or as she describes it, among “corn sprouts, cabbages and four kinds of beans/ prostrate before old suicide bombings, starvation,/ AIDS, earthquakes, the unforeseen tsunami…” In other words, even Kumin’s garden poem is invaded by the language of the world’s devastation, here in the very tangible form of old newspapers. The poem “Elegy” is interwoven with a recipe for making cole slaw—and yet in this very piece of domesticity, Kumin manages to mourn a friend who is now gone albeit indirectly. It is collisions like these, of domesticity and daily life with grim realities that characterize the book’s first section.

To skip ahead to section three, “Turn it and Turn it,” here we find Kumin assuming the role almost of tribal historian for Jewish-American traditions. Kumin situates her own family within this tradition, but also widens her scope to the larger Jewish history. Although a short section, there’s strength to these poems, especially the poem “The Saving Remnant,” which begins:

Turn it and turn it
the old rabbis said
except for the goddess
hatching her world-egg
except for the planet
she births from her navel
my father is in it
lifting his wine cup
breaking the challah
Fridays at sundown…

This opening typifies Kumin at her best, both in her metrical precision and clarity, and also in her ability to juxtapose successfully an entire cosmology as well as a familiar domestic scene. Even here, religious tradition intersects the reality of war, and Kumin frames her religious history with loss.

Section two, however, is Kumin’s most ambitious and problematic. This section, “Please Pay Attention,” is the overtly critical and political. She references Abu Ghraib, black site interrogations, the beheadings of Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson, even the disingenuous way in which the Iraq war was sold to the American public. While addressing these topics, clearly difficult poetic subject matter, is in itself audacious, the kinds of baldly obvious observations Kumin makes are no different than what you could get from an issue of Mother Jones. It makes the sympathetic reader want to nudge Kumin, whispering “Yes, sure, I agree with you, it outrages me too, but you and I both, we’re just sitting here reading about it in the newspaper. Not shedding new insight on these things.” The treatment of these subjects in poetry is difficult because it is hard to write about them without oversimplifying, or simply sounding outraged. Overall, this section is large-print, Reader’s Digest-condensed version, although certainly fueled by righteous indignation. Still, hand me my Mother Jones instead, and flip ahead to section four of Still to Mow.

Indeed, in section four, Kumin makes up for any shortcomings in any earlier section of the book. “Looking Back,” as the section is aptly called, is strong; in this section, Kumin confronts her own aging. These poems are dazzling, complex, and insightful. Take, for example, the gorgeous “Looking Back in My Eighty-First Year,” which may well go down as one of the most beautiful poems on marriage ever written. In this poem, Kumin describes foregoing a fellowship to Grenoble in favor of an early marriage, and now wondering how things would have been different had she just taken the fellowship and waited. The poem ends thus:

Sixty years my lover,
he says he would have waited.
He says he would have sat
where the steamship docked

till the last of the pursers
decamped, and I rushed back
littering the runway with carbon paper…
Why didn’t I go? It was fated.

Marriage dizzied us. Hand over hand,
flesh against flesh for the final haul,
we tugged our lifeline through limestone and sand,
lover and long-leggèd girl.

This is vintage Kumin; one feels that here she’s back in her wheel-house, operating from a place where she is well-equipped with brilliant language to convey glimmers of larger truths. In a poem like this one, Kumin unites her talents as an impeccable craftsperson of verse with a larger sense of the emotional underpinning of a great poem. It is this poem, and indeed this section, that make this a collection of poems worth owning.

Still to Mow, never uninteresting in its ambitions, rises to greatness in its final poems. For long-time readers of Kumin and newcomers alike, this is a valiant and ultimately touching poetry collection.