[In the following review, Hunt compares In Deep: Country Essays to Brenda Chamberlain's Tide-Race, emphasizing their thematic similarities.]

What is waiting on the other side? Maybe nothing special, maybe only more of the same, dear enough for this watcher. But the quest is real. To get there you have to go in deep.” This ending to Maxine Kumin's first essay of the collection In Deep serves as a point of departure for our quest into her life in the country, while her question and response echo the voice of Brenda Chamberlain in Tide-Race. Chamberlain charts her life on a remote, sparsely populated island off the coast of North Wales, whose inhabitants coexist uneasily with each other and with the sea. For both writers, the journeys they describe are at once a movement outward to discover the essential rhythms of the natural world and inward to find each writer's place and purpose in this scheme.

In part because her geographical isolation is more profound than Kumin's, Chamberlain is more completely and constantly absorbed in the business of daily survival. Haunting and graceful, her writing expresses her sustaining bond to the natural world. Weaving together physical description, legend, and poetry, she evokes the very soul of the island—its weather, its geography, the ebb and flow of life upon it. Descriptions are as clear and evocative as her drawings of the sea and of the creatures who dwell there; her training as an artist complements her writing, while her word portraits by themselves illustrate the striking power of her observations.

The water was limpid, simple as the blue height of sky. But the island, the island, was the legendary rock, the magnet of our blood. For an instant forgetting the reality in dream I saw it as an unattainable, nameless vision. Going back through troughs and rainbow sprays, nobody in the world seemed more fortunate than I, for this was life and colour and movement under the sun.

While Chamberlain focuses steadily on revelations and challenges that constitute her daily existence, she is also stirred by visions of past and future and by what she calls “the strong pulling of the dead.” Here on this island, the nourishing and destructive aspects of the sea are equally present. But despite social conflicts, scant food supplies, and the ever-present possibility of death on the sea, she finds in this threatening landscape a sustaining continuity. Her dream fantasies about joining her mother seal in the sea symbolize her identification with the natural world; but, on another level, these dreams simply show her strong affinity with the natural life forces around her. Her sense of belonging to this cycle is most eloquently expressed when she writes that a seabird “is handing on to me the living tradition of the island's past that is the present moulding the future.”

Maxine Kumin's essays also reflect a deeply rooted sense of time and place. Kumin sees an awareness of the past as essential to the creative process and posits that “a sense of region” is also present. She wonders where women writers derive their sense of place, including their plumbing of “interior landscapes.” Like Chamberlain, she depends on the natural world for both her creative and physical sustenance. But—in part because of her academic obligations, in part because her isolation is not as complete—Kumin feels a deeper conflict than Chamberlain between the urge to write and the need to hew a life from the land. While she cites “the centrality of the natural world” as the foundation for her writing, she finds herself unable to resist the pull of the outside world away from that center. Writing of this conflict, she seizes upon a quote from Anne Tyler about “hewing our creative time in small, hard chips from our living time.”

Despite her self-proclaimed struggle to accommodate both her living and her writing, Kumin's work resonates with striking harmony; on these pages, at least, life and work coexist amicably. She leads us through the seasons with the vigilant eye of Thoreau, to whom she is unabashedly indebted. Although her descriptions are detailed—she goes on for pages about varieties of mushrooms—they are lively and engaging, never pedantic or esoteric.

The polypores are also tree-dwellers, and they are probably the most obvious fungi in the wood. … Everyone has seen tough old “conks”—shelf-like protrusions adorning the torsos of aged trees, and most people have idly picked up dried birch polypores for the fun of drawing pictures on their flat white undersurfaces.

Much of the book is devoted to writing about horses of one kind or another, but you do not have to be an equestrian to appreciate Kumin's meditations about them. As she builds a fence, waits at night for the birth of a foal, and reflects on the similarities between poets and mules, she writes so precisely and so intimately that we feel we are sitting in her country kitchen or out in the barn. Of animals, for example, she confides,

[they] are my confederates. They arrive, sometimes with speaking parts, in my dreams. They are rudimentary and untiring and changeless, where we are sophisticated, weary, fickle. They make me better than I am.

She goes on to observe that her daily life provides a metaphor for her work, confirming that, despite the difficulty of finding time to write, life on her New Hampshire hill provides a rich source for her thoughts.

I think that Kumin may speak for Chamberlain and does so for herself when she refers to the choice to live in relative seclusion as “a paradox … it is making the world over as you want it to be, while at the same time coexisting with nature.” Yet the work of both writers is grounded solidly in this paradox. Even in the midst of physical hardship, hostile weather, and sudden death, each finds renewal in the promise of change.