[In the following review, Howard attributes the thematic coherence and “eclectic curiosity” of Connecting the Dots and Selected Poems to Kumin's “remarkable” consistency with the themes, techniques, and ironic perspectives that distinguish her career.]

“Poetry is like farming,” writes Maxine Kumin. “It's / a calling, it needs constancy, / the deep woods drumming of the grouse, / and long life. …” Kumin's analogy will not suit every poet, but for the former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, the figure could hardly be more apt. By her own description a “restless Jewish agnostic,” Kumin long ago found a home in the natural world and a secular calling in the literary arts. And in a career spanning more than three decades, she has shown not only constancy but remarkable consistency. From her earliest poems to her most recent, she has held fast to her dominant themes, her inductive methods, and her darkly ironic outlook, which has altered only in the respect that it has become more recognizably itself. At once ardent and sceptical, her vision has grown more stringent over the years, and the strain of social criticism has become more insistent. What has not changed is Kumin's earthy realism, her generous receptivity.

Kumin's Selected Poems harvests the work of nine previous collections. Connecting the Dots presents her most recent poems. Together these volumes illustrate the breadth of the poet's concerns, while also defining her obsessions. As might be expected, the Selected Poems includes such well-known pieces as “The Nightmare Factory,” “Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief,” “The Long Approach,” and “Nurture” It also gathers poems major and minor, grave and slight, on subjects as diverse as dreamlife, country living, swimming, family relations, gardening, horses, war, racial prejudice, social inequity, and the poet's body, which she affectionately dubs Old Paint. Connecting the Dots, though narrower in range, displays a similar catholicity of subject and tone, setting meditations on aging and mortality cheek by jowl with lighter poems, including a posthumous monologue spoken by the poet's dog, a fantasy about doing chores in heaven, and a fairy tale about a princess who marries a bear.

Yet if these collections demonstrate an eclectic curiosity, they also reflect thematic coherence. Over the decades, themes and images recur, accruing meaning and importance. Among the most central is the poet's father, a Philadelphia pawnbroker, to whom she attributes a “love ingrown / tight as an oyster.” No less prominent is the figure of Anne Sexton, Kumin's friend and fellow poet, whose death by suicide left a grief expressed but unassuaged. Rivaling that loss, the departure of a daughter for a life in foreign countries—her “death-by-separation”—occasions some of Kumin's most affecting lines:

I do the same things day by day.
They steady me against the wrong turn,
the closed-ward babel of anomie.
This Friday your letter in thinnest blue
script alarms me. Weekly you grow
more British with your I shalls
and now you're off to Africa
or Everest, daughter of the file drawer,
citizen of no return.

(“Seeing the Bones”)

Lamenting parental loss, these lines also advance Kumin's continuing dialogue on the theme of mother-daughter relations. Developed in “The Envelope,” “Making the Jam without You,” and other poems, that dialogue coma to full fruition in “Letters,” a recent sonnet-sequence, in which Kumin confronts unhappy memories of her mother:

Your laugh, your scarves, the gloss of your makeup,
shallow and vain. I wore your lips, your hair,
even the lift of my eyebrows was yours
but nothing of you could please me, bitten so deep
by the fox of scorn.

From this recollection of the “rage of adolescence,” the sonnet goes on to track the growth of mutual acceptance, as “little by little,” mother's and daughter's lives “pulled up, pulled even.”

It is characteristic of Kumin to have chosen a rigorous traditional form when probing a subject close to the heart. As she explained in an interview, she “almost always put[s] some sort of formal stricture on a deeply felt poem. …” In the passage just quoted, both meter and rhyme are inexact, the third line being an approximate pentameter and hair/yours an imperfect rhyme. But whether her adherence to form be loose or strict, Kumin's craft can be felt in the symmetries of her forms and the densities of her textures, as when she speaks of pea-pods' “intricate / nuggety scrota” or describes a toad “lopsidedly hopping until his motor runs out.” Craft is also conspicuous in the endings of Kumin's poems, which close not only with a click but with reverberant finality. “If only they'd all consented to die unseen,” concludes “Woodchucks,” “gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.”

To characterize Kumin as a formalist would not be inaccurate, but neither would it be fair, insofar as that term connotes a subordination of content to an inherited or preconceived form. Kumin's forms are seldom conventional—and almost never predictable. And far from proceeding, a priori, from formal conventions, they appear to have grown from observation or, as often, from factual information. “It seems important to have the facts,” Kumin has insisted, “partly for accuracy and partly out of inquisitiveness”; and if the influences of earlier American realists—Lowell, Bishop, Sexton, Moore—can be found in Kumin's poems, so can the presence of Joe Friday, with his deadpan demeanor and his relentless demand for the facts.

The chief danger in Kumin's empirical approach is that it will produce fact-laden, literal poems, long on actuality but short on imaginative transformation. From time to time Kumin succumbs to chat pitfall, and her poems read less like lyric poetry than essays in verse. But in her most convincing work, Kumin allows the literal fact to become a natural symbol, as in “Splitting Wood at Six Above,” where the split wood calls to mind the release of Anne Sexton's “stubbornly airborne soul.” Or, as in “The Bangkok Gong,” she employs realistic detail to explore a complex emotional state:

When barely touched it imitates
the deep nicker the mare makes
swiveling her neck
watching the foal swim
out of her body.
She speaks to it even as
she pushes the hindlegs clear.
Come to me is her message
as they curl to reach each other.

Describing an object brought back by her daughter from the Third World, these lines express restrained emotion through precise description.

Forceful though it is, “The Bangkok Gong” leaves an impression of radical unease. Its tensions are articulated but not resolved. That quality of irresolution, ubiquitous in Kumin's poems, is at once their strength and their limitation, lending an ambience of intellectual honesty, on the one hand, and of spiritual uncertainty, on the other. The latter quality assumes the foreground in Kumin's poems on religious subjects, particularly “In the Absence of Bliss,” where she propounds an unanswered question: “[W]hat would / I die for an reciting what?” Reading the last line of diet poem (“No answers. Only questions.”), one is reminded of Patrick Kavanagh's remark in “Poetry and Pietism”: “It appears to me that we cannot go on much longer without finding an underlying faith upon which to build our world of letters.” But if Kavanagh's remark poses a pertinent challenge to Kumin's honest doubt, that challenge does not go unanswered in her art. “The only sanctity, really, for me,” Kumin has said, “is the sanctity of language.” And if her poems sometimes leave one's deeper appetites unsatisfied, her adroit and passionate language offers sustenance of another kind. A believer in the world's redemptive power, she has not failed to keep the faith.