Jan 3, 2010
Like so much of the poet’s work, Maxine Kumin’s “The Retrieval System” focuses on human-animal interactions. In this case, the poet examines the surprising ways that certain animals remind her of the “lost” people in her life and how these correspondences serve to “retrieve” those individuals.
The first line of the poem sets the pattern. “It begins,” Kumin writes, “with my dog.” The pronoun “it” refers to the system of resemblance that seems to well up from the poet’s subconscious when she is alone. In the first of five stanzas, the...
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