Kumin, Maxine | Victor Howes (essay date 1973)
Victor Howes (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: A review of Up Country, in The Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 65, No. 79, February 28, 1973, p. 9.
[In the following review, Howes praises the "country ways" of Up Country.]
Maxine Kumin is a poet attuned to country ways. She is heir to a tradition of pastoral poetry that reaches back through Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy all the way to its rural beginnings in Theocritus. Nature poetry, she comes to tell us, is alive and well and sinking its taproots in New Hampshire soil.
Whether she writes of a woodlot in winter, tadpoles hatching in the spring, of berrypicking or a night visit from a mosquito, she brings to her page what Wordsworth called "the harvest of a quiet eye." Her eye is on the object—the tininess of "the shrew's children, twenty to a teaspoonful;" the near invisibility of minnows—"a see-through army in the shallows / as still as grains in a rice bowl"; the ambiguity of...
[The entire page is 315 words long]
Navigate
