[In the following review, Cole offers a positive assessment of Nurture, praising Kumin's “affectionately modest demeanor.”]

Maxine Kumin is a senator for man and beast and earth. She speaks for the caribou, the manatee, the orca, the arctic fox, the Aleutian goose, the trumpeter swan, the dusky seaside sparrow, the broodmare, the grizzly bear, the Scotch Highland heifer, and all this only to begin a list, for there are also three generations of kin to consider and a plot of land to be worked. Please let me not be counted among those critics who devalue her “overabundance of maternal genes.” In a world where dolphins are sacrificed daily for our light lunches of tuna fish salad, should there not be one among us to take up their cause?

Fifteen years ago a classmate in college introduced me to Maxine Kumin's poetry. He was a philosophy student from Tidewater, Virginia, who owned all the volumes of Maxine Kumin, John Ashbery, and little else. An unlikely pair, one might think. Yet tossed in the Cuisinart, perhaps the blended result would yield Emerson, another of my friend's favorites. In any case, since we are all, as writers, children of Emerson, and Maxine Kumin's broadest good sense is immediately at hand in her latest volume of poetry, Nurture, her ninth, let me recall his regard for Margaret Fuller, whom he praised for adopting “all the people and all the interests she found” at his home upon her visits. For so rich was her mind that “she never was tempted to treachery by the desire of entertaining” in her fortnight stays. And how he relished her conversation, whose details seemed to him to include “wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future”—all of which seem the happy sum of Maxine Kumin's new collection.

Overlooking the dreadful Bambi jacket-photograph, which seems to want to sentimentalize this book, these sensible poems record the passage of seasons in the North Temperate Zone. In “Surprises” Kumin reports, “After fifteen summers // of failure …” a hundred California peppers cluster in her garden:

Doubtless this means I am approaching
the victory of poetry over death
where art wins, chaos retreats, and beauty
albeit trampled under barbarism
rises again, shiny with roses, no thorns.

Such abundance, too, leads to Proustian recall of her mother's leftover stuffed peppers, served “every washday // Monday,” reminding the reader that the poet's heart is not so tidily divided as the book's sections—“Catchment,” “Place Names and Datelines,” and “More Tribal Poems”—might suggest. For there is a complex “crossover” in the worlds that Kumin inhabits or that inhabit her. We see from the book's title piece that her urge to shelter both the “wild child” and the “bummer lamb” is equally strong. And later, in “In the Park,” she explains:

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels. Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.

Further on one recognizes that as much for man, as for those with whom he shares the earth, it is a world of “good and harm.” For all creatures, as newborns, must struggle to their feet, or into the air, or against a tide, and along the way nature can be a “catchment of sorrows.” This perhaps explains the specter of war looming often in these pages. In the poem “Grappling in the Central Blue,” a “benevolent blue October” sky leads Kumin to call back an afternoon in 1940 with her “unemployed uncles / hangdog in the yard / playing touch football …” while they could not know the war that awaited them:

One is to die by torpedo.
One in a swamp on maneuvers.
Only the oldest, at a great age
a child again, outlasts my father
to drift off alone in bed.

And elsewhere on these pages, as from an intaglio print of war's ravages or of German troops marching, the hellish past can dynamite quite suddenly into a poem's narrative.

The one longish poem in this collection “Marianne, My Mother, and Me,” is a litmus test of sorts for Kumin's easy-going prosaic style, which elsewhere can be clipped and sinewy in the best shorter lyrics (“Nurture,” “In Warm Rooms, Before a Blue Light,” “Catchment,” “Sleeping with Animals,” “In the Park,” and the wonderful “A Game of Monopoly in Chavannes”). It's fun to watch the rhymes unreel, yet they are not as exhilarating as the couplets which often conclude other poems, and the language finally remains peculiarly proselike. Unchallenged, Marianne Moore steals the limelight with her cameo appearances, and one longs for more morsels of her. Whatever the verdict on the poem (mine is a demurring yea), it does offer a useful glimpse at Kumin's poetic sympathies. We see her as a young woman, noting Marianne Moore's pronouncement, “‘We / must be as clear as our natural reticence / will allow. …’” And later, after a Moore poetry reading, Kumin reports:

We never meet. I am content to take
to heart her praise of idiosyncrasy,
exactitude, intensity, technique.
Her “be accurate and modest” speaks to me.

Surely one cannot come away from Nurture without a sense of its accuracy and the author's affectionately modest demeanor. Detractors may translate modesty as thinness, yet in a world of shadow, thinness, too, can yield an agreeable, sometimes even divine translucence.