[In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus evaluates Women, Animals, and Vegetables in terms of the relationship between isolation and the creative process.]

[Maxine] Kumin's new book Women, Animals, and Vegetables: Essays and Stories creates a convincing portrait of a woman who seems to have gone Yeats one better, creating perfection of the work as well as the life, or at the very least has demonstrated how the two in rare instances may coincide. Having moved twenty years ago from suburban Boston to a New Hampshire farm, for reasons detailed in the essay “Long Road to an Upland Farm,” she has also demonstrated how isolation itself and an attentive reflection on the tasks of everyday life, are conducive to the creative process, an issue discussed in another essay entitled “Menial Labor and the Muse.”

For people who do not care about how art and life are related or who are likely to dispute the comforts of horses, dogs, jam, mushrooms, and country life in general, this book may seem to contain a bit too much granola or be a bit too recondite and tame. Nonetheless, the care Kumin brings to the work would grace any profession, and the details, descriptions, and advice regarding such things as the care, feeding, training, breeding, and parturition of horses, the raising of mushrooms or exotic vegetables, or the making of jam are precise, informative, and practical (many of them originally appeared in magazines like Country Journal, Countryside, and Organic Gardening).

At the same time, they bring an outlook to these practices that is arcadian in flavor and intention. By example if not by pronouncement, Kumin reminds us of the close relationship between poetry and pastoral, and while the times are not receptive to the connection, in some fashion these essays are her Works and Days and lend substance to her conviction that her writing “depends on the well-being that devolves from” a list of “chores undertaken and completed,” on “contentment in isolation [which] pervades every good working day,” and on “the haunting appeal of enclosure, the mindless suspension of doing simple, repetitive tasks … that allows those free-associative leaps out of which a poem may occasionally come.”

From these reflections it is but a simple, though necessary, step to the stories, which extend the values of the life she describes in the essays to scenes and situations which both challenge and confirm their assumptions. Introduced by a quote she has borrowed from Virginia Woolf that “Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners,” several of the stories make a direct reference to the values Kumin has learned from farm life and from living closely with the cycle of nature. These include “Solstice,” which is about the process of grieving compensated for by service to the environment, and “The Cassandra Effect,” about a case of olfactory hysteria originating in unresolved conflicts from childhood, compensated for by a love of horses. More generalized are stories which deal with family conflicts through several generations, particularly of women, where the need for some kind of retreat, usually into nature or the natural, balances the disruptions and distortions of contemporary life. For example, “Beginning with Gussie” is a story about three generations of independent, professional women—mother, daughter, and granddaughter—whose very independence threatens their relationship until a birth draws them together. Such a bond, originating in mutual need and mutual affection, may even span the gulf between a hunter and a radical environmentalist, whose love affair in “The Match” seems natural despite their conflicting political philosophies. And the final story, “Flotation Devices,” originally published in this magazine, is about a snorkeling expedition and three professional women who get separated from their group and wind up stranded on a rock—an understated study in resourcefulness, truth discovered in isolation, and solace in shared response: which is, after all, a sensible description of its author.