[In the following review, Padnos outlines the major themes of In Deep: Country Essays, focusing on Kumin's daily routine and her relationship with her horses.]

As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin writes, her husband proclaims they're “in too deep,” what with running a hill farm in New Hampshire (“fourteen acres of forage fields”) complete with fences to mend, six horses to tend, sugar maples to tap, roofs to shovel in winter, meat to raise for the table. … But the payoff is evident as this collection [In Deep: Country Essays] shows: such rigorous living feeds the author's imagination, makes her marvelous poetic voice ever stronger, gives meaning and metaphor to her life as each year plays out.

Divided into four sections that follow the seasons, the book celebrates, by turns, the joys of birdwatching, mushroom gathering, and baking fragrant breads and assembling hearty soups, among other country pleasures. Satisfying, to be sure, but these merely orbit around the sun and center of Kumin's life: the “large and redolent” occupants of the hill barn, her beloved horses. She confesses to hours spent “hanging over the fence” in summer, watching their ballet, “endless, repetitious, aesthetically spectacular,” but never tiresome. Neither, it seems, is the routine drudgery it takes to keep these animals. “Hay first. Water next. Grain last,” says one of Kumin's poems, but readers, please note that this water must be warmed on below-freezing mornings. There are other matters to attend to: the daily mucking out of stables, repairing tack, and exercising these outsize pets. And there is emotional wear and tear on the owner as well. Consider Kumin's moving tale of the foal whose high-strung mother rejected her. Then there's the story about the burying of yet another foal who, heartbreakingly, never breathed.

This is a deeply personal, graceful, and inspiring work that doesn't idealize country life even as it proclaims its earthly rewards. Maxine Kumin gently but persistently makes us rethink our own links to the land and its animals as if to urge us to go “in deep” ourselves to probe for the “impulse for poetry.”