[In the following review, Tillinghast surveys Selected Poems, 1960-1990, assessing Kumin's contributions to “nature” poetry.]

This selection of work [Selected Poems, 1960-1990] by Maxine Kumin from a 30-year writing career will be a welcome addition to any poetry library. Her poems bracingly remind us of several enduring virtues valued by anyone who reads verse for pleasure. First, like today's most vital and interesting poets, Kumin is neither a full-time “formalist” nor a practitioner of the monotonous free-verse “plain style” many of her contemporaries have been stuck in since the 1960's. She has the versatility to build an orderly, measured structure in rhyme and meter, or to adopt the easier virtues of free verse for a more transient, informal effect when she chooses to do so.

Second, her poems are about something. They often tell stories, and many of those serve the function of preserving family history. It's a family history worth preserving, involving a familiar journey to the New World from turn-of-the-century Europe. Leafing through an old Baedeker, the poet comments:

                              One
of my grandfathers is in here somewhere
living in three rooms over his tailor
shop on the Judengasse in Salzburg or
Prague, stitching up frock coats on Jew
Alley in Pilsen, or in the mews
of Vienna's Old Quarter.

The American part of the story is also familiar:

                              Pa, ascending
among the nouveaux riches on Wall Street specs,
is seldom home. Released from baby-tending
by a starchy Nanny, Momma finds renown
as a demon shopper.

The familiarity of the material does not prevent Kumin from presenting it vividly. The lines just quoted come from a recent long poem, “Marianne, My Mother, and Me,” which narrates the poet's education and development side by side with a portrait of Marianne Moore, seen first “with her bright red hair / in braids wound twice around her head, / as long as that. She's the same age as my mother.” The poem traces Kumin's evolving understanding both of Moore and her own mother as role models and of the lives of these older women as cautionary tales—acknowledged at the end of the poem as “both shapers of my alphabet.”

The nuanced parallels and differences among these three women's lives are delineated in solid eight-line stanzas using the partial rhymes Kumin is adept at; their story traces some of the history of our times from “before the Great War” to the present. Moore chooses an unmarried life, while “My housebound mother, crazed with her first-born, / opens the lid of the Steinway with an axe. … Chopin is packed away. / A wet bar flows in the space of the vanquished Steinway.” Moore's esthetic guardedness challenges the young Kumin: “‘We / must be as clear as our natural reticence / will allow,’ she announces. Rapturously / I try this statement on like a negligee / that's neither diaphanous nor yet opaque.” Later, as Moore's persona becomes fixed as “an eccentric spinster,” Kumin finds: “Strong emotion has no place in her poems / but slithers into every line I touch.” She seeks to steer a course between Moore's chaste caution and artistic independence, on the one hand, and her mother's participation in the messy realities of marriage and family that have cut her off from the artistic and intellectual life.

As good as Kumin is at telling her own family's stories and placing them in context, she stumbles when she ventures into political and cultural commentary. This is not surprising in a poet whose primary loyalties are to the personal narrative, to the natural world, to things that can be touched and tasted and smelled. “Heaven as Anus” has that dated, mildly surrealistic, slightly hysterical tone typical of many poems written in the early 70's, when poets were lining up in opposition to the Vietnam War:

In the Defense Department there is a shop
where scientists sew the eyelids of rabbits open
lest they blink in the scorch of a nuclear drop
and elsewhere dolphins are being taught to defuse
bombs in the mock-up of a harbor.

Her particular scorn fixes on that enduringly easy target intellectuals love to hate: Southern fundamentalism. “The Jesus Infection” is especially meanspirited. This poem about driving in Kentucky behind a truck filled with pigs, sporting a bumper sticker reading “Honk If You Know Jesus,” ends with an egregious slur: “We are going down the valley on a hairpin turn, / the swine and me, we're breakneck in / we're leaning on / the everlasting arms.” The attempt at humor cannot disguise the ugliness of the sentiment; these lines allude to a Protestant hymn, while equating believers with “swine.”

“The Selling of the Slaves,” all black-and-white vice and virtue, likens an auction of brood mares in Kentucky to a slave auction, taking place in what Kumin turns into some kind of evil church. This poem is better thought out and better constructed than others, like “The Jesus Infection” and “Living Alone With Jesus,” but equally informed by regional and religious animus: “In the velvet pews a white-tie congregation / fans itself with the order of the service. / Among them pass the prep-school deacons / in blazers.” We are asked to believe that class, Christianity and patriarchy conspire to mistreat expensive horses: “When money changes hands among men of worth / it is all done with sliding doors and decorum / but snake whips slither behind the curtain.” We hear hisses from the audience, all but audible in the alliteration of “snake whips slither,” a la 19th-century melodrama.

To return to the virtues of her poetry: happily, Kumin's prejudices do not accompany her into the natural world. An early poem, “Watering Trough,” pictures a discarded Victorian bathtub set out in a field for cows and horses to drink from. The poem concludes with the fine simplicity of this invocation:

come slaver the scum of
timothy and clover
on the cast-iron lip that
our grandsires climbed over
and let there be always
green water for sipping
that muzzles may enter thoughtful
and rise dripping.

As precise an elegist as she is an observer of nature, Kumin combines both modes in “Grappling in the Central Blue,” which celebrates the pre-World War II innocence in which “unemployed uncles / hangdog in the yard / playing touch football / shooting squirrels.” The poem rises to a fine apostrophe:

I declare you
Month I Will Not Let Go Of
October
I take you into my arms
even as festoons
of mushrooms, adorned beneath
with accordion-pleated gills
attack the punky elms
and fasten on their decay.

Kumin speaks to us most strongly when her sympathies are engaged by the natural world, but she by no means fits the stereotype of “nature poet”; she accepts the natural world's predatory side along with its beauty. In “Catchment” a bull mastiff pup that has snatched a doe kid “snapped its neck with one good shake.” In “Encounter in August” she watches with pleasure and doesn't try to interfere when a foraging bear wipes out the beans in her garden: “I find the trade-off fair: / beans and more beans for this hour of bear.”