[In the following review, George explores the major themes of Looking for Luck, situating them in the context of Kumin's career.]

With Looking for Luck, her tenth volume of poetry, Maxine Kumin joins the Norton stable of writers. I'm usually uncomfortable with that term, but for Kumin, the horsewoman-poet of American letters, it's appropriate. For decades she has written about the connections between humanity and the rest of the folk who inhabit the world. In Looking for Luck she continues this and other themes—death and loss, family and legacy, how to survive devastation and celebrate life.

The poems here are often about the intervention of imagination in the natural world. The opening, “Credo,” announces Kumin's belief in magic—in the “rights of animals to leap out of our skins,” as in an Indian legend in which suddenly “there was a bear where the boy had been.” The epilogue, “Rendezvous,” comes full circle to magic again, this time as a renewed, reclothed eros. Evoking a legend that says a male bear can feel shame, she writes that a woman encountering one is advised to remove her clothes, which will scare him away. But in Kumin's version the woman slips off her clothes while the bear removes his teeth. His pelt falls to the ground as a bed for them.

He smells of honey
and garlic.
I am wet
with human fear.
How
can he run away, unfurred?
How can I, without my clothes?
How we prepare a new legend.

(p. 92)

Kumin's volume titles usually indicate a great deal about her intentions, with implications both ironic and serious. Here “luck” means coincidences she invests with meaning—but with a wry glance over her shoulder, a tongue sometimes so far in her check it's down her throat.

In “Looking for Luck in Bangkok,” Kumin describes a superstition in that country, where she apparently spent time: if you walk under an elephant, you'll have luck. People engage in the ritual at a market while she watches:

They count out a few coins,
then crouch to slip beneath
the wrinkly umbrella that smells.
of dust and old age
and a thousand miracles …

(p. 19)

Kumin participates, with ironic reflections:

I squat in his aromatic shade
reminded of stale bedclothes,
my mother's pantry shelves
of cloves and vinegar,
as if there were no world of drought,
no parasites, no ivory poachers.
My good luck running in
as his runs out.

(p. 20)

In “Progress,” luck continues to get bound up with nature. Kumin moves from Bunyan's Pilgrim who “attains his goal the way enough / ants can carry off an elephant / and time will mend a migraine,” to a horse, an injured “Indian paint” whose owners turn him out “to starve to death—the law of the West” and who “wander[s] into a distant slough instead,” there to become “a champion cutting horse.” Then she invokes the memory of Hiroshima:

The boggy hollow is dark and perilous,
sometimes language impedes, some-
                                        times it helps.
“Observe moon in first phase.” The
                                        professor drops
articles to be more easily
comprehended by his Japanese
students who say, “To you, Hiroshima
is death. To us, is beisbol team,
long life, Hiroshima Carp.”
They thrive in sloughs, these golden fish.
Such luck they do not need it deep.

(pp. 21-22)

Pilgrim's luck is in his dogged persistence; the Indian paint would have died but he gets lucky—a champion cutting horse springs from his skin. It's the students' luck to be “golden fish” who thrive in the slough of catastrophe, thumbing their noses at death.

Progress in all its forms arouses a dry scepticism in Kumin. Not only do different generations and cultures understand it differently (for the teacher “progress” means enduring Western guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima, for the students, a jaunty amnesia), but progress itself is a human concept, and therefore limited. Only nature is limitless, dangerous (“The boggy hollow is dark and perilous”) and flourishing. “Praise Be,” which immediately follows “Progress,” begins with the birth of a horse and ends with images of peace, natural abundance.

I tear the caul, look into eyes
as innocent, as skittery
as minnows. Three heaves, the shoulders
                                        pass.
The hips emerge. Fluid as snakes
the hind legs trail out glistering. …
Let them prosper, the dams and their
                                        sucklings.
Let nothing inhibit their heedless
                                        growing.
Let them raise up on sturdy pasterns
and trot out in light summer rain
onto the long lazy unfenced fields
                                        of heaven.

(p. 23)

1982 marked a watershed in Kumin's career: Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (Viking) anthologized her six previous collections. In individual volumes since then (The Long Approach in 1986 and Nurture in 1989, both from Viking), she has developed the terms of survival first fully articulated during the late 1970s, when she wrote elegies to her closest friend, poet Anne Sexton. Life is full of losses, but we must get on with it, enduring—even thriving, as do the women in “Voices from Kansas”:

You learn to pull out and pass, say the
                                        Wichita women
Whom distance has not flattened, who
                                        cruise at a cool
80 miles per hour toward the rolling-pin
                                        horizon. …
… Long hours at a stretch behind the
                                        wheel
they zoom up to Michigan to speak at a
                                        conference,
revisit a lover, drop in on old friends.
They will not be sequestered by space. …
As the grassland is rooted, so too are the
                                        Wichita women.
No absence among them may go un-
                                        marked into sleep.
Like wind in the wheat, the boundary
                                        blurs but keeps.

(pp. 49-50)

Now in her sixties, Kumin often writes poems about the life cycle that brings together the family of other creatures with her own; these she calls her “tribal poems.” In “The Geographic Center,” the poet watches a pair of pileated woodpeckers, “[l]ike us, a faithful couple.” The speaker and her husband

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.

(p. 65)

The human family is both part of and separate from nature. What humans and horses “say to each other in the cold black / of April” is what “connects us most surely to the wet cave we all once burst from gasping, naked or furred” (“Sleeping with Animals”). We must comfort other creatures (“I believe in myself as their sanctuary,” writes Kumin in “Credo”). They can offer us little comfort in return, of course, unless we relinquish our separation from them and lie down with horses, as would an old woman in one of the volume's most moving pieces, “The Confidantes”:

Dorothy Harbison, aetat 91,
stumps into the barn on her cane and my
                                        arm,
invites the filly to nuzzle her face,
her neck and shoulders, her snowdrift
                                        hair
and would very likely be standing there
still to be nibbled, never enough
for either of them, so sternly lovestruck
except an impatient middle-aged
                                        daughter
waits to carry her mother off …
Leaving, Dorothy Harbison
speaks to the foal in a lilting croon:
I'll never wash again, I swear.
I'll keep the smell of you in my hair.
and stumps out fiercely young on her
                                        cane.

(pp. 83-84)

Kumin is at war with consciousness, the beloved enemy who must be embraced, who will help us make sense of things—but whose self-deceptions make us lie to ourselves about who we are. Her writing has a hard knot of realism, tending toward but never reaching cynicism. It speaks to our fears in “The Green Well,” when she lets herself down,

rung by rung into
the green well of losses, a kitchen
                                        midden
where the newly dead layer by layer
overtake the long and longer
                                        vanished …

(p. 32)

We're all destined for the midden heap (“It does / not end with us, not yet, though end it will”). Only “being with” and “being in” nature offer connectedness and continuity.

In Kumin's earlier work her gaze upon death was steady, yet often penetrated by anger and anxiety. Now there is an acceptance in which resignation is only part of the picture. A near-lightness suffuses some of her strongest poems. “Blindingly trite, this calling on the dead,” she concludes with a half-smile in “Visiting Flannery O'Connor's Grave.”

Kumin's poems to and about the dead continually play upon her own aging and her attempt to ready herself for death. She watches death and loss in the barn, the pasture, the woods, with clean-sighted toughness. In “Porch Swing,” the speaker sits with her one surviving brother: “Old orphans, our three middle siblings / dead, we look death straight / in its porcelain teeth, daring it / to squeeze onto the porch swing …”

While she is in no sense melancholic (she'd find that an intolerable indulgence in herself), the mourning of loss has become central to her poetic vision. We may know that we're mortal, but we don't have to like it. In “Finding the One Brief Note,” we sing, like the mockingbirds, “our single-minded still imperfect song. / We eulogize autumn.” This mortal music, full of longing, betrays that “we mean, / roughshod and winged, to last forever.”

Kumin's strength remains directly connected to celebration, for it is infinitely renewable life, as well as life's brutality, that she sings of and mourns. As a survivor who knows her survival is only temporary, she uses poetry to come to terms with as many permanent losses as possible before the final one.