[In the following excerpt, McDowell considers the honest intimacy of Connecting the Dots.]

Maxine Kumin's eleventh book of poetry, Connecting the Dots, will do nothing to diminish her considerable reputation. Here is a remarkable journey. The most talented survivor of the generation of self-destructive poets (Berryman, Jarrell, Lowell, Plath, Sexton), Kumin has lived long enough, and written well enough, to achieve that most elusive, coveted prize: composing one's best poems in the latter stage of one's life. She has written wiser, more generous, and mature poems than any of her long-departed peers. Especially in the poems of the last ten years, Kumin has grown into the first rank of American poets.

In this new volume, her intelligence, compassion, liveliness, and skill are everywhere apparent. Personal moments in the poet's life expand to universal experience. This is so in the epistolary sequence to her late mother, the poem to her daughter working in Bosnia; it is true in the intriguing rhymes of “The Height of the Season,” in the perfect snapshot, “After the Heat Wave,” and in the compact, poignant “Vignette” (a must-read for parents and children contending with Attention Deficit Disorder); it is there, too, in “Chores,” a love poem about working together:

… I hope in the afterlife there's none of this stuff
he says, stripping nude in the late September Sun
while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked
with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks.
I hope there's no bedding, no stalls, no barn …
But after a Bloody Mary on the terrace …
                                                                                he says
let's walk up to the field and catch the sunset
and off we go, couple of aging fools.
I hope, he says, on the other side there's a lot
less work, but just in case I'm bringing tools.

Kumin is also capable of assuming the role of other characters, as in the relaxed, homespun monologue, “The Last Words of Henry Manley,” and “The Bridge-Builder,” a five-page poem in the voice of Charles Ellet, Jr., designer of the suspension bridge over Niagara Falls, on the occasion of testing the span in 1848 with a horse and cart.

If any mood dominates this collection, it is one of looking back and summing up. As I began to read through these poems I thought, “She's working up to prophecy.” Later, I realized that the accumulation of Kumin's work is prophecy. This is the reward, perhaps, of a life lived honestly and well.