[In the following excerpt, Kitchen commends the spirit of Connecting the Dots, praising Kumin's rejuvenation and urgency in such familiar themes as nature, survival, and memory.]

Maxine Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973. She served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1981, and in 1995 she became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Connecting the Dots is her eleventh collection of poetry. The book's dust jacket suggests that she “expands on themes that have engaged her most strongly,” but I would suggest that, though this is certainly true, there's more than expansion going on. There's a kind of rejuvenation. These poems have the energy and urgency of youth; they are active more than reflective, leaving the reflection to take place after the fact, in the mind of the reader. Even memory seems to reside very close to the surface in this new collection.

Kumin's poems have always been toughly clearsighted; nature, for her, is wonderfully complicated and complicating, never romanticized. And humanity is seen as part of nature. Connecting the Dots opens with a crown of sonnets called “Letters,” placing the emphasis on the human. The letters are, if anything, silent missives written to a deceased mother who might or might not have understood them, a recitation of the poet's thorny, shifting relationship with her mother until they eventually “pulled even,” and a retrospective appreciation that leads, full circle, to the final line where the mother sends a brief message to the daughter. Because of the circular motion of the repeated lines in a sonnet cycle, the first and last lines combine to acknowledge—at last—a reciprocated love. From this perspective, the speaker launches a series of poems in which she links her life not only to her parents but to her children and grandchildren, then enlarges the circle by finding connections with other poets, friends, neighbors, historical figures, animals—in short, everyone and everything. A good example of this panoramic view comes at the end of “Rehearsing for the Final Reckoning in Boston,” where the Berlioz Requiem is filling the Symphony Hall:

Like a Janus head looking backward and forward,
pockmarked by doubt I slip between cymbals
to the other side of the century where our children's
children's children ride out on the ranting brasses.

Kumin's poems assume continuity. That is the backdrop against which she can voice her religious doubts and her principled beliefs.

“After the Cleansing of Bosnia” sees those beliefs mirrored, even magnified, in her daughter's chosen mission with the UN in war-torn countries (this time Bosnia), but the poem moves ever outward to its enigmatic ending in the dream of an owl with a mouse in its talons:

We saw there was no obstacle
he-who-looks-behind-without-looking,
he-who-looks-ahead-without-blinking
could not thread through, backward or forward,
and we were falsely comforted.

In some ways Kumin also appears to have set herself the task of unblinkingly looking both backward and forward in order to assess and repossess the world. In the book's last section (but at the emotional center), two poems about her friendship with Anne Sexton are seminal, possibly even the source of Kumin's newfound energy. The first, “New Year's Eve 1959,” recalls Sexton dancing with Jack Geiger, the “Physician / for Social Responsibility.” Anne kicks off her shoes, and the dance (“setting all eight gores of her skirt / twirling”) begins. But the scene is replayed in memory, and the poet gives the evening a context it didn't have when the notes of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” filled the room. “This was after Seoul and before Saigon,” she says, placing the moment in the flow of human history, placing herself in the role of observer and, even, in the role of survivor:

                                                            madcap Anne
long dead now and Jack snowily
balding who led the drive to halt the bomb
and I alone am saved to tell you
how they could jive.

“October, Yellowstone Park” follows directly—elegantly formal in its rhymed and slant-rhymed (abba) quatrains—as an elegy to Sexton on the seventeenth anniversary of her death, but also as an affirmation: “Of sane mind / and body aged but whole I stand by the sign / that says we are halfway between the equator // and the North Pole.” At the halfway point of the poem, in full sun, on the 45th parallel, Kumin (as woman, as friend, as poet—but not as “speaker,” which would distance her from her own lived life) declares:

Fair warning, Anne, there will be no more
elegies, no more direct-address songs
conferring the tang of loss, its bitter flavor
as palpable as alum on the tongue.

Despite her assertion, she lapses almost instantly into direct address:

                                                                                                                        I've come
this whole hard way alone to an upthrust slate
above a brace of eagles launched in flight
only to teeter, my equilibrium
undone by memory. I want to fling
your cigarette- and whiskey-hoarse chuckle
that hangs on inside me down the back wall
over Biscuit Basin. I want the painting
below to take me in. My world that threatened
to stop the day you stopped, faltered
and then resumed, unutterably altered.
Where wildfires crisped its hide and blackened
whole vistas, new life inched in. My map
blooms with low growth, sturdier than before.
Thus I abstain, I will not sing, except
of the elk and his harem who lie down in grandeur …

Even the rhyme scheme is altered; it shifts dizzily through a series of permutations, then resumes for the final stanza. Kumin moves from the tang of personal loss toward incantation. Her declaration of independence ends with a vision of Sexton hammered into memory. But the residual—and enduring—image is the sweep of Yellowstone and its resolute regeneration.

The present-tense immediacy of the poem brings it close to the reader, even as the formal aspects allow the writer a certain distance from the material. The result is a tension that energizes the work. It is experiential, not referential. The book's two sestinas—one early on, one after the poems about Sexton—also benefit from the constraints of form. “In Praise of the New Transfer Station” may be the only poem to celebrate a dump since Wallace Stevens did it—and what a dump this is! Kumin remembers the “pre-ecological days” when it was actually called a dump, but now recycling makes for a social occasion. This poem is pure fun—and its repetitions are so subtle that at least this reader was brought up short at the final three lines, suddenly (and only then) made aware of the form.

“The Riddle of Noah” is more noticeably a sestina from the beginning, so Kumin feels free to take liberties with the words, substituting rhymes, antonyms, and combinations to form an intricate network of sound and association which can sustain the content without trivializing it. Spoken directly to her grandson (“You want to change your name”), the poem moves from the child's wish for another name to a memory of the poet's brother (who did actually change his name) and then on to its central memory:

                                                            The names that we go by are nothing
compared to the names we are called. Christ killer! they mocked
and stoned me with quinces in my bland-looking
suburb. Why didn't I tattle, resist? I guessed
I was guilty, the only kid on my manicured block
who didn't know how to genuflect as we lock-
stepped to chapel at noontime.

Again, the present-tense framework of the poem, combined with past-tense recollection, revivifies memory. Present and past exist simultaneously. The logic of association governs the poem and allows for its surprising turns, as it moves well beyond personal memory into a shared history that implicates not only the present but the future:

Spared being burned at the stake, being starved or gassed,
like Xuan Loc, Noah is fated to make his mark,
suffer for grace through good works, aspire to something.
Half-Jewish, half-Christian, he will own his name, will unlock
the riddle of who he is: only child, in equal
measure blessed and damned to be inward-looking,
always slightly aslant the mark, like Xuan Loc.
Always playing for keeps, for all or nothing
in quest of his rightful self while the world looks on.

And so Connecting the Dots concludes by filling in the picture. From Kumin's vantage, looking at the progress of time, the world requires balance. On the day Sarajevo falls, she appreciates the music of a student orchestra. There's continuity in the changing seasons, the sense of the seed's tenacity even as she tucks the garden in for the winter. And always there's the word: reading Hopkins, she finds the “priest's sprung metronome” keeping descriptive time with the emerging landscape; poised on horseback, she sees a fox with its brood, wishing she possessed the word the vixen uses to call her young out of the den:

Its sound is o-shaped and unencumbered,
the see-through color of river,
airy as the topmost evergreen fingers
and soft as pine duff underfoot
where the doe lies down out of sight;
take me in, tell me the word.

Kumin's own words feel unencumbered—lithe, shaped, charged with purpose.

Maxine Kumin has achieved by now a kind of wisdom based in honesty and grounded in her love of nature—her appreciation of its fruitfulness, its unruliness, its almost willed persistence. Her poems ask us to assess them in a complex manner, employing our intellect, our sense of form, even the biographical knowledge she has shared with us in other books over the years. For those interested in Kumin's overall accomplishment, Selected Poems, 1960-1990 (covering work from her first nine books) has just been published by W. W. Norton, and a collection of critical essays, Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, edited by Emily Grosholz, was recently issued by University Press of New England. But there's nothing retrospective about Connecting the Dots; it has the feel of the transitional, building on and extending the themes of earlier work even as it seems to be embarking on a new venture characterized by an active voice and a genuine curiosity about the future. Kumin teaches us, by example, to survive.