[In the following excerpt, Miller offers a positive assessment of In Deep: Country Essays.]

Nature writing is essential, if only to remind us that there may still exist what Thoreau, perched on Mt. Ktaadn in Maine, called “the unhandselled globe”—a wonderful phrase Maxine Kumin borrows for a chapter title. The better sort of nature book occasionally diverts us from rustic delight and ecological exhortation deep into the unhandselled darkness for a lesson in otherness. Ktaadn, Thoreau wrote, was beautiful, but also “savage and awful,” a creation of “Chaos and Old Night” as alien as “some star's surface” yet of the same material as our bodies. In terror he exclaimed: “Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in Nature—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it. … Who are we? Where are we?” Now there's the right mood for starting a book about nature.

Maxine Kumin's In Deep, a gathering of previously published country essays, is grouped into four seasons and is focused on her New England farm. Most frequently she writes—with real feeling and with irony—about her relationship with her horses. “It's madness,” she complains one icy morning, “this glut of critters to look after and feed, but it is a glut of shared needs.” She has tethered herself near horses the better to understand their world. “These New England upland pastures are like a secret garden,” she rhapsodizes, “like a poem. Every dip and scarp is now engraved on my brain pan.” She has learned, from Thoreau, to cultivate “a holy sense of the minute observable details of natural life.”

Fortunately she often leavens holiness with humor. Who could bear a consistently elevated presentation of details about country kitchens, popple, mushrooms, and the care and feeding of horses? Kumin is a realist: “There is no more, no less, peace of mind in the disciplined life of the barnyard than there is in the routine of the office.” Mushrooms go into the stewpot as well as the poem. Popple goes into the fireplace (and the fodder).

Occasionally technology mingles with husbandry and begets a metaphor: “We worm the babies [colts] in the middle of John Dean's testimony and at last I see a connection. Although it makes me want to be sick, I count the nematodes in the little ones' shit. … I am making sure.” More amusing, perhaps more outrageous (far out, if you will) is an essay-length metaphor comparing mules and poets. Both are expected to survive on reduced feed. Both endure despite predictions of obsolescence. Both (among many other similarities) tend to survive long falls, literal or figurative. Reference to such writers as Sexton, Plath, and Berryman in that connection reveal the deeper wounds underlying Kumin's whimsy.

With more obvious reverence she describes a foal's birth and first commerce with its mother. To be present she sleeps in her barn. Biologists refer to bonding: “I call it a miracle,” she writes, simply. She rides out on Sundays, in an equally reverent mood, exploring “all those roads not taken”: “One by one they peter out like rambling thoughts, like glimmering ideas unrealized.” She contents herself along the way with these minute observables. “The quest is real. To get there, you have to go in deep.”