[In the following excerpt, Cotter argues that survival is the primary theme of the poems in Nurture.]

Maxine Kumin in Nurture, her eighth collection of poetry, describes a return to ancestral Austria in “On Reading an Old Baedeker in Schloss Leopoldskron” and “The Festung, Salzburg.” She wonders if she will meet some distant and unrecognized relative there, a survivor of the Anschluss. Survivors populate this poet's work. Caribou, seals, turtles, penguins and other animals struggle to survive. “I am thankful for what's left that's wild,” Kumin reflects in “Distance,” and lists coydogs, hoot owls, moose, and bears. As she mows with her Tuff-Cut power motor on her birthday, she echoes Hopkins' line: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” In “Homage to Binsey Populars,” she directly alludes to Hopkins' pain at trees being cut down. If she is to be reincarnated, the poet says in “Reviewing the Summer and Winter Calendar of the Next Life,” she would prefer to be a barn swallow, grosbeak, or wild turkey, but not a weasel. She is drawn to dramas of animal rescue, Kumin states in the title poem, even if she seems to suffer, as “the critic proclaims, / from an overabundance of maternal genes.” This mothering instinct is best represented by “Sleeping with Animals,” an account of a birth watch at her New Hampshire farm:

Nightly I choose to keep this covenant
with a wheezing broodmare who, ten days past due,
grunts in her sleep in the vocables
of the vastly pregnant. She lies down
on sawdust of white pine, its turp smell blending
with the rich scent of ammonia and manure.

A bonding is made between human and animal:

What we say to each other in the cold black
of April, conveyed in a wordless yet perfect
language of touch and tremor, connects
us most surely to the wet cave we all
once burst from gasping, naked or furred,
into our separate species.

The bond between generations is beautifully rendered in “A Game of Monopoly in Chavannes.” The game being played with her grandchild in France recalls summers long ago in the real Atlantic City which gave the game its street names. As her grandson loses, he fights back tears, but in reality he is their “sole inheritor”:

All that I have is his, under separate cover
and we are the mortgaged nub of all that he has.
Soon enough he will learn, buying long, selling short
his ultimate task is to stay to usher us out.

For no one survives forever. In “Bringing Back the Trumpeter Swan,” Kumin notes the irony of conservationists who destroy the balance of nature in trying to preserve one species at the expense of others. In “Thoughts on Saving the Manatee,” she concludes that we should “revert to the Catch of the Day / and serve up the last few as steak marinara.” But like the parsnip and pudding stone she uncovers in “Turning the Garden in Middle Age,” Kumin is herself a survivor. Many of these poems are sure to endure for their integrity of spirit, human warmth, and strength of expression.