[In the following positive review, Barrington examines the appeal of Always Beginning and Inside the Halo and Beyond.]

I recently had the pleasure of re-reading Virginia Woolf's essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” Nowadays, it is unfashionable to tell anyone how they “should” do anything, but Woolf had no such inhibitions. As she pointed out, readers do sometimes miss the delicious heart of a book because they are looking for the wrong thing.

Woolf advocates taking from each genre “what it is right that each should give us.” But, she says, “Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices.” Of memoirs and diaries, both of which she wrote, there is no word, although these genres certainly have their share of misguided readers.

People sometimes assume that making literature out of personal writing is easy. While they might be in awe of a poet's language or a novelist's imagination, they believe the journal or memoir to be essentially similar to their own private writings, and read only for juicy personal details, particularly when the writing is by someone they have long admired. They shut out the rhythms of the language, the well-placed image and the perfectly-judged intimacy of the voice—all of which characterize these two works by the eminent poet, Maxine Kumin.

Always Beginning is a collection of Kumin's essays, speeches, reviews, and a long interview, most of which were first published in the 1990s. The collection is substantial, and will call out to admirers of Kumin's twelve collections of poetry, which include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Up Country (Harper, 1973). It will beckon to those who love her essays about the New England farm where she and her husband of 55 years raise horses and organic vegetables. It will attract those who are interested in her close friendship with Anne Sexton and the ways in which these two ground-breaking, feminist poets supported one another as they broke with tradition by daring to focus their poetry on themselves and their womanly view of the world. Some readers will come to this collection with an admiration for the staunch, but not showy, political perspective in Kumin's life and work (in 1998 she resigned as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets to protest its then appalling lack of diversity).

But no matter how the reader arrives here, she will almost certainly find herself enchanted by sections of the book that fall outside her original area of interest. The gardeners, for example, may surprise themselves by enjoying (and understanding) the section on prosody; and the poets, like me, will find themselves making notes on composting for those raised beds we've been thinking about for so long. Essays of various lengths address motherhood, swimming (Kumin was a serious long-distance swimmer), literary mentors and the Sexton friendship. One section comments on the work of Marianne Moore, Josephine Jacobsen, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, while another explains Kumin's well-known attachment to traditional or adapted metrical forms, as well as the function of dreams in her work. In this section, too, she comments on some of her own poems, which allows the retrospective voice of memoir to enter:

Now, looking back at “Poem for My Son,” I reenter the struggle against the soft edge of sentimentality that I fear flaws many of my early poems. I have spent thirty-five years paring expressions of love and commitment down to the bone. Today, I would never permit myself the next-to-last line of the poem …

(p. 150)

One poem that she looks at in some detail is “For Anne at Passover,” which weaves together elements of the Passover Seder with Christian symbols of Easter. Her comments begin with a quote from an old review of Halfway, the book in which the poem first appeared (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961). The anonymous reviewer complains that the cover material mentions Kumin's “Jewish heritage,” claims that Kumin's Jewishness does not affect her rhetoric, and dismisses such Jewish details as do enter her poems (a Menorah; a Torah) as “New Yorker-ish exotica.” Kumin responds by describing her observant Reform Jewish childhood. Her slightly defensive tone here (“Interested readers can follow the thread of my self-declared Jewish heritage through a spectrum of other poems …”) saddens me, since Kumin, in fact, never minimizes her Jewishness, but seems to remain true to its actual importance in her life—sometimes relevant, sometimes not.

Kumin's feminism, too, remains an undercurrent, only occasionally becoming the focus of her attention—as in the PEN address explaining her resignation from the Academy of American Poets. But reminiscences reveal the early instinctive feminism that forged an unusually egalitarian marriage, and she is generous in attributing to the feminist movement her later consciousness about both the past and the present. Looking back on the poetry scene that she and Sexton experienced in the fifties, she can now see what was invisible at the time: “Told ‘You write like a man,’ we took it for the supreme compliment that it was. I don't know the source of the saying ‘There was a man so poor he fell in love with jail’ but it exactly fit our situation.” She tells, too, of being told by John Ciardi, poetry editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, “I'd love to publish one of the poems in this batch, but I published a woman last month …” This, says Kumin with the irony of hindsight, struck her as entirely reasonable.

One of the most impassioned pieces in the book, “Premonitory Shiver,” was given as the keynote address to a writers' conference in 1998. Paying tribute to the writings of the late Terrence Des Pres, Kumin exhorts poets, while not turning away from the personal details of their lives, to venture into the largest, most difficult subjects: nuclear threat, war and genocide. Poets, she says, must name the things of everyday life: “‘house, bridge, fountain, gate, jar, fruit tree, window,’ as Rilke says, ‘in such a way that even the things themselves never hoped to exist so intensely.’” But naming, in this nuclear age, must expand to embrace a wider vision. “For those of us,” she concludes, “who read the Book of Genesis as mythic, its metaphor for the beginning of life arouses in us a vivid premonition of its ending. I think we must now address this premonitory shiver.”

Given that this speech was made on May 14th, 1998, the “premonitory shiver” about life's ending acquires an extraordinary personal dimension: less than ten weeks later, Kumin's own life was very nearly ended by an accident which broke her neck. She woke in a hospital inside “the halo”—“a bird cage big enough for a large squawking parrot,” fastened to her skull by four titanium pins. Late in the process of recovery, she was told by the orthopedic surgeon, “Ninety-five percent of people with your fracture never make it to the emergency-room. Ninety-five percent of the ones who do, end up as quadriplegics.” But Kumin's diary-like account, Inside the Halo and Beyond, turns out to be more than an eloquent recital of physical therapy, family support and personal determination through disaster.

Organized under date headings (most written close to the days they describe, thanks to the constant presence of Kumin's daughter, Judith, who took dictation onto a laptop in the hospital room), the book widens its view to include reminiscences about horses, speculation about poetry and pondering on marriage and family. It is an inspiring account of a hard-won recovery, but for me the most telling thread of the book—the piece that so clearly underscores Kumin's character—is the story of her relationship with the horse, Deuter, whose bolting caused the accident.

Though they take up relatively little of the narrative, there are three crucial meetings between the injured poet and her horse. The first takes place on a short visit home from the hospital while she is still pinned into “the halo,” which scares the horse: “… Deuter takes one look at my bird cage, snorts his fear snort, and retreats to the back of the stall. He is unwilling to approach me but flicks an ear in response to my voice.” A page later, she reflects:

I know some people have had a horse put down after such an event because they could not bear to look at him again. Do I forgive Deuter for having almost killed me? Do I love him any less? I forgive him for doing what he could not help doing; there was no malice in his bolting. My affection for him is unchanged and I am confident that so is his for me.

(p. 114)

At the second meeting, Deuter “snuggles his head under my armpit in the old way, his standard show of affection, asking to have his ears stroked,” and the poet feeds him carrots. “I take off my useless glove and bury my dead right hand in the fur under Deuter's red mane. His animal warmth comforts me.”

Kumin elegantly describes the experience of rehabilitation, people encountered along the way, and the essential loneliness of the hospital experience, even when supported by a loving family. But ultimately it is a book about courage. That she chooses to end it with a third passage about the horse tells us something important about the place where she finds that courage. From the early masterpiece, “Morning Swim,” in which she describes, in rhyming couplets, a long-distance swim across a lake, to the balanced prose of “Inside the Halo,” she inhabits a world filled with water, animals, pastures and woods, fungi, beans, and even stones that “from time/to time imitate oysters or mushrooms.” This is what she calls her “peaceful kingdom,” from which she ventures out into the “pobiz” circuit, the political arena, and the human world of children, family and friends. When finally she climbs shakily onto Deuter's back, she writes:

I've been planning this for so long! I thought regaining my seat in the saddle would bring with it some sort of epiphany, a revelation of huge consequence. Instead, I feel merely at home. I am back in my peaceful kingdom.

You don't have to have broken your neck, helped a mare give birth, or stayed married to one person for fifty years in order to enter this world. The voice is perfectly judged: friendly enough to invite you into its story, but unlikely to stir up more than a fleeting fantasy of dropping in for tea—finely-judged distance that is crucial to making this kind of art. While Kumin, with her total absence of egotism, may not provoke the excessive adoration of, say, a May Sarton fan, she will, with her measured cadences, always be a true artist.