[In the following excerpt, Baker praises Kumin's achievement in Looking for Luck, focusing on the rhetorical schemes and aesthetics of simplicity that inform her poetry.]

Maxine Kumin is, and for a long time has been, one of our most widely praised poets. Her tenth collection of poems, Looking for Luck, is representative of her accomplishment, style, and vision. She writes like a lot of poets these days; or, more likely, many try to write like her. Her poems are never qualified by anything less than maturity, grace, and sureness of touch. It's as if her strong, good poems were found rather than composed. As if. Altogether appropriate for an ars poetica is Kumin's favorite figure of the horse, as companion and model:

Whenever I caught him down in the stall, I'd approach.
At first he jumped up the instant he heard me slide
the bolt. Then I could get the door open while
he stayed lying down, and I'd go in on my hands
and knees and crawl over to him so that
I wouldn't appear so threatening. It took
six or eight months before I could simply walk in
and sit with him, but I needed that kind of trust.
I kept him on a long rein to encourage him
to stretch out his neck and back. I danced with him
over ten or fifteen acres of fields with a lot
of flowing from one transition to another.
What I've learned is how to take the indirect route.
That final day I felt I could have cut
the bridle off, he went so well on his own.

“Could have.” The conditional verb represents the gentle but knowing style of Kumin's work. To be sure, transparency and ease are rhetorical schemes, as purposeful as any baroque or neoclassical pattern. Her technique descends from the New England plain style, the quieter side of the romantic impulse, whose designs are humility and reverence rather than ecstasy and rapture. Here in “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem,” Kumin confirms an aesthetic preference to be (or to seem) closer to simplicity than clutter. The important, subtle paradox of such ease is that it is the product of hard work, training, a “kind of trust.”

It is then more illustrative than contradictory that quite a number of these poems show Kumin to be fairly self-conscious about her unself-consciousness. “Credo” finds Kumin's speaker reciting a litany of aesthetic and personal values: “I believe in magic,” she writes here: “I believe in the rights / of animals to leap out of our skins.” A few lines later, other favorite tropes are announced:

I believe in living on grateful terms
with the earth, with the black crumbles
of ancient manure that sift through my fingers
when I topdress the garden for winter.

A romantic faith in the magical capacities of nature, a reverence for animals and myth, a stewardship of the earth—these are Kumin's leitmotifs. A few pages later, in “Taking the Lambs to Market,” she reveals another aesthetic design. The character Amos, “who custom cuts and double wraps / in white butcher paper whatever we named, / fed, scratched behind the ear,” earns her praise for his ability to take “something living” and provide sustenance for his patrons, though they “deplore his profession.” He is, after all, “a decent man who blurs the line of sight / between our conscience and our appetite.” The brusque honesty of his occupation elicits from Kumin more admiration than disgust, in part because she sees in his example her own imperative to render nourishment out of harsh necessity.

Kumin is, by temperament, a naturalist. Her speaker is as conversant with the garden or barn as with human company. It's not that Kumin avoids people in her poems; on the contrary, they clearly interest her—from the “chambermaids at the Marriott” to politicians and neighbors. But it is nature that evokes her most passionate, exact writing, and provides a significant model for her to instruct or explain people to us—not the other way around. She seems drawn to people out of responsibility and to nature out of desire. To me, her finest poems are those which ironize or fuse the relationship between the natural and the human, between the pastoral and the political. In “The Geographic Center,” for instance, a pair of pileated woodpeckers, “the Harpy-like great flappers,” are among the bestiary of visitants to the speaker's winter yard where she and her husband have “put out 50 lbs. of birdseed … suet, sundry crusts and crumbs.” This obligation to nature becomes transfigured, several stanzas later, into “a 50 lb. pack” the husband carried during basic training in World War II; and the birdseed they leave out is echoed in “the seedy back way / out of a hotel dining room” where Bobby Kennedy was shot. The yard's plentiful small dramas reiterate the political struggles of “[her] generation.” This excellent poem is typical of Kumin's use of nature to provide the material impetus for a revelation about people, an equation she completes in the poem's closing:

We shoulder what this life has lots
of, prisoners of hope as set
in our own way as the woodpeckers
whose bright red crests and red mustaches
glint against the flourishing bittersweet
we say we should but never will rip out.

Throughout the thirty-six poems of Looking for Luck, Kumin's method is anecdotal and representative. She moves expertly between free verse and formal prosody. Her speaker is stable, instructive, experienced, and much more like a real person than a construct of language. She works, in other words, fruitfully within the mainstream. Occasionally, despite her clear accomplishment, something in Kumin's work leaves me wanting more. I suppose that which we call mannerly or serence in a person can seem, in a poem, safe or usual. I wish Kumin's indignation, every now and then, were closer to anger or fury, her affections more fiery, more obsessed. I wish she approached extremity, oddity, or disorder a touch more willingly. But perhaps that is too uncharacteristic of this fine poet whose use of the plain style seems like a matter of faith. Modesty is a trait she holds high.