[In the following review, St. Andrews assesses Selected Poems within the context of Kumin's career.]

Back in the good old days when Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country (1973), being a nature poet was almost to be expected for females. In fact, nature imagery has served not only Emily Dickinson but every other modern poet from Robinson Jeffers to Mary Oliver. Yet Kumin was, even back then, more than the usual categorical imperatives: New England farmer, naturalist, Jewish-American, woman poet.

To put this simply, Maxine Kumin is and has long been a writer's writer, composing not only a dozen books of poetry (the most recent of which is Connecting the Dots, 1997) but also four novels and a new prose collection. Women, Animals, and Vegetables. The Pulitzer and other honors including the Aiken/Taylor Award for Modern Poetry attest to the fact that Kumin has added a dimension to the relationship between humans and creatures: some precision, some unexpected juxtapositions, some honed edge to the usual animistic reverence.

For one thing, her poems counterpointed soil and spirit in oddly vivid and informing phrases. In her poem to a root cellar (selected from House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate) “parsnips, those rabbis / have braided their beards together / to examine the text. The word / that engrosses them is: February.”

The honors she has received (being appointed Consultant to the Library of Congress, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and New Hampshire Poet Laureate) affirm her keen-eyed, unsentimentalized kinship with the world of gassed woodchucks and “the language of April.” Kumin is indeed a nature poet. And so much more. When she first went off to farm horses in the 1970s, readers and critics had yet to realize fully just how frail Earth's ecosystem was and how prophetic and elegiac the cautionary voices of poets like Maxine Kumin were becoming.

She has remained alert, aware of the flowering green line that leads us all back to Thoreau, back to our uncles and lost mothers and comrades. In “Apostrophe to a Dead Friend” she explains aging and a surcease of sexual sorrows to one who died too young to know or accept the fuller facts of life: “that men have grown smaller, drier, / easier to refuse. / Passion subsides like a sunset.”

One hears neither disenchantment nor romanticism in the poems of Maxine Kumin. Her poems of life, of Earth and its creatures are not spells cast in a fairy kingdom. Rather, her creative landscape is a solid, sacred place where the rituals of life, love, and death are performed purely: “Even knowing / that none of us can catch up … / we are making a run / for it. Love, we are making a run.” Reading Kumin's Selected Poems, 1960-1990 constitutes an act of pure connection.