[In the following review, George highlights the environmental themes in Nurture, noting a movement in Kumin's verse toward global and ecological issues.]

In Nurture Maxine Kumin continues to explore many of the themes that for decades have compellingly informed her poetry, fiction, and meditative essays: the clear and present delights of the natural world and our connections with it as creatures who know we are part of it; our responsibility toward more fragile forms of life on the planet we share; the necessity of endurance in the face of odds we cannot finally beat; the salvaging of human care and love from the wreckage of time and loss; the significance of legacy and continuity in a world of mortal mutability.

She means to make us ponder lovingly the webs of relationship that bind us to fates we both control and, ultimately, share. Stubborn celebration is the tone: she bids us “rejoice to be circumpolar, all of us / on all fours obeying the laws of migration” (“With the Caribou”). She sees the parallels between us and her dog when he carries frogs from place to place in his mouth, “doing what he knows how to do / and we too, taking and letting go, / that same story” (“Custodian”).

Increasingly hers is a poetry I would call environmental; if she used to be a nature poet, she's now globally ecological. The danger here is the same as with any other political poetry—that the song will be devoured by or subsumed in the polemic, yielding a fine ideal rendered graceless in the poetic frame—but Kumin largely escapes the trap. Sometimes awkwardly expository lines sneak by, as in “Thoughts on Saving the Manatee,” in which “Worldwide less than five / thousand manatee remain.” The trumpeter swan poem is similarly marred by the necessity to impart facts. But usually the poet manages to make her connections beautifully and clearly, letting her animals “run like a perfectly detached / statement by Mozart through all the other lines / of my life, a handsome family of serene / horses glistening in their thoughtlessness”; she translates conversation “conveyed in a wordless yet perfect / language of touch and tremor” (“Sleeping with Animals”).

Kumin eschews both moralism and sentimentality through her insistence on facing cruelty, predation, and stupidity, whether committed by our fellow animal travelers or by us: “Nature a catchment of sorrows. / We hug each other. No lesson drawn.” Even when the tone is admonitory, the tale cautionary, the reader is gently invited to draw the lesson through implication and inference. Kumin offers no untenable idealism here, only the civil suggestion that we consider the depth of our footprints in the world.

As fine as the environmental poems are, the collection's most accomplished statement, perhaps made weightier by what surrounds it, is a new “tribal poem” (Kumin's longstanding name for poems about her extended human family). “Marianne, My Mother, and Me” links her personal and poetic heritages by paralleling her mother's life with Marianne Moore's, mediating their connections and mourning their distances through her own transformations. While there is much in the poet to remind a reader of Moore (Kumin recognizes this in Moore's own “be accurate and modest”), I am also reminded of Kumin by the artist she addresses in “A Calling”: like Georgia O'Keeffe, Kumin combines intimacy and passion with immense reserves of detachment, reservation, dignity. Both artists celebrate life with a generous civility and encounter the bones of death with an even gaze, always keeping (as Kumin says elsewhere) “our working distance.”