[In the following review, Buttel examines the themes, tone, and structure of Connecting the Dots.]

In this eleventh collection of her poems, [Connecting the Dots] Maxine Kumin continues in a vein that has become familiar to her readers. These poems do not bristle with avant garde initiatives (nor should we require them to). The satisfactions come, rather, from attending to the accounts of a humane and intelligent observer whose love for children, family members, dogs, bears, and horses is boundless. Her heart quickens for the afflicted, the lost, and those victimized by hate and violence. At the same time, she admires skill, expertise, and order, as in the performance of music, the making of jam, and the building of the bridge at Niagara Falls in 1848—or, as indicated in the title poem of this volume, the ability to connect the dots, to organize the details of everyday existence, and, further, by implication, to take responsibility in the course of time and change for shaping one's life. Kumin reveals much about herself without being searingly confessional. She has cultivated a colloquial ease that fits smoothly into loosely formal patterns. Parallel to this stylistic interweaving, and one of the chief distinguishing marks of her verse, is the juxtaposing of seemingly trivial and anecdotal details with more serious preoccupations. Her voice is thoughtful, open, wryly amused at times, and often wise. When ironic, she is more playful than caustic.

“Youth Orchestra, With Dogs,” a typical Kumin poem, mixes reminders of the evils of war with the confused and partly humorous preparations for a concert. It begins: “On the day that Sarajevo falls / a gang of music-loving mongrels / scraggy, loosely arranged / and mysteriously ownerless / lolls panting by the junior harpist / who plucks bright sprigs of Vivaldi. …” When the musicians begin performing, “Mahler is ragged. A smoother Mozart. /. … / Such concentration is required / to stay in time. …” Here, the speaker herself drifts out of present time and recalls “Years ago” when she “ferried drums, cellos, children / to rehearsals, saved seven dogs / the pound prepared to gas, took in / A foster son thrust up by an earlier war. …” Then with shocking detail the horror of war intrudes upon her consciousness and her enjoyment of the peaceful University of the South campus scene in which the gothic arches create a protective “medieval surround”: “What was it the freelance photographer / said in her helmet and flak vest? We / zoomed in on exploded arms and legs, / instant orphans, blownup pets / and god! who cares?” (italics in poem). In the final stanza, however, peace and harmony in contrast to religious, gender, and racial divisiveness (the very divisiveness which stirs up wars) assert themselves, as the various instruments and the cultural diversity of the players come together in unison and symbolic renewal “Here on the Episcopalian plain / that once shunned women, Jews, and colored skin, / an orchestra containing all assembles. / The first violinist, sincerely / sixteen in a Laura Ashley print, / arrives on stage to modest applause. / The Adam's-apple conductor raises / his baton. Members in vigorous unison / embark on Copland's ‘Appalachian Spring.’”

This is all ably managed, with the light, buoyant tone associated with this college campus version of pastoral sharply contrasted with the dark reminders of war. But a question does arise: How with the rage of war can the sweet, innocent charm of the occasion, accentuated by the “Laura Ashley print,” hold a plea? The answer may well be that Kumin wanted precisely to show how fragile the beauty is (“Such concentration is required / to stay in time”), an evanescent civilized harmony in the midst of wars that have erupted throughout history. Another, more serious question: does the speaker wear her sympathy and virtue too much on her sleeve? Here, I think, the stress on the nobility of her actions, her big-heartedness, undermines the tricky but effective counterpoint of tones in the poem. Such speakers are common in Kumin's poems and they tend to become problematical when their sympathies are highlighted.

In each case, a question of aesthetic control arises. For example, the speaker's sympathy is certainly aroused in “Vignette,” a partially rhyming sonnet which describes the departure every morning of Emmet on the Head Start bus and his return every afternoon. Emmet “suffers from attention / deficit disorder but loves the schoolyard / slides and swings, lunchtime, and Sue, his driver.” On his returns home the horse, “old foundered Radar / uproots himself from the muck of his pasture / and focuses his one good eye uphill. / The van pulls over. Emmet, clutching the apple / Sue unfailingly provides, / scrambles over the sagging fence rail.” As boy and horse connect, the poem concludes, “No attention deficit on either side.” Love prevails: Emmet's for Sue, Sue's for Emmet; Emmet's for Radar, Radar's for Emmet. It cuts through the psychological jargon of “attention deficit disorder.” Indeed, love is part of an enabling order—the routine of departing and return and the pattern of expectations met and fulfilled. The dots are connected. Both Emmet and the horse are handicapped, and appropriately live on Poorhouse Road, but they are rich emotionally. How easy for all this to slip over the edge into the slough of sentimentality. Some readers might claim that it does; a matter of taste is involved here. For me, the poem is saved, partly because of the reciprocal ordering and balancing of details (“Emmet, who is first on / and last off”; “Every morning” and “Every afternoon”) but mostly because the speaker's big heart is not on display.

If Kumin tends to be overly fond of speakers whose hearts are so obviously in the right place, so tender and loving that the threat of sentimentality hovers over the poems (reading a large number of these poems at a sitting emphasizes the problem), the volume nevertheless contains a high proportion of excellent poems, in some of which the speakers are other than the sympathetic maternal figure—the “farm-raised” Dalmatian in “Gus Speaks,” for example, who “ran with the horses” and now lies “under the grasses / they crop, my own swift horses / who start up and spook in the rain / without me, the warm summer rain.” The poignancy here seems more affecting for the distancing device of having Gus speak his own epitaph. But even in a poem—“The Word”—in which the animal-loving speaker is like a female St. Francis (“Watch me / mornings when I fill the cylinders / with sunflower seeds, see how the chickadees / and lesser redbreasted nuthatches crowd / onto my arm …”), Kumin can be compelling. Here, the speaker yearns to comprehend the language a vixen uses in the education of her kits, especially the word she uses to bring them out of their burrow:

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.

This lover of nature articulates exquisitely her awareness that human knowledge can never connect fully with the otherness of the animal world, however much she bonds with her horse that she is riding, however tantalizingly close she is to grasping the word.