[In the following review, Schulman comments on the themes and style of The Long Approach.]

Maxine Kumin's poetry is, at its center, profoundly human. Throughout her work, she has displayed a tough-minded, unsentimental compassion for the patient animals she knows well; she has portrayed men and women with generous regard, and also with an acute eye for common virtues and moral aspirations.

These qualities, as well as her close identification with the land, the farm, and natural life, enable her, in The Long Approach, to deal with subjects that are difficult at best, which she treats with directness, and with a stark bareness of utterance: nuclear war; ungoverned technological advances; senseless modern combat.

This is an important book. It succeeds because the author writes beautifully of her rich full world that is in imminent danger. “Getting Through,” for example, contains these lines:

Snow falls on the pregnant mares,
is followed by a thaw, and then
refreezes so that everywhere
their hill upheaves into a glass mountain.
The horses skid, stiff-legged, correct
position, break through the crust
and stand around disconsolate
lipping wisps of hay.