[In the following review, Dieter praises Kumin's exploration of the rural experience in In Deep: Country Essays.]

How long has it been since you were invited to a farm home in the New Hampshire hills? Quite some time, I'll bet. It was for me. My own homeplace, half a century, half a continent away, has long since gone back to wind and grass and so I was pleased to accept Maxine Kumin's invitation, which will come to you as it did to me, in the form of a handful of essays all nicely stanchioned between the covers of this, [In Deep: Country Essays,] her 15th book.

Kumin and her husband managed to do what the rest of us only threaten—get away to the country. They found the south slope of a wooded hill and cleared a field or two, put up some fence (“Making fences presupposes not only pastures but a storehouse of diligence”), bought several horses, planted a few seeds. Now they're enjoying a stubborn serendipity at the end of a steep and rutted lane, having traded “easy access for solitary splendor.” Maxine still writes, of course, still travels and teaches out there in the world, wisely remembering John Donne's admonition that none of us is an island.

Be advised, however, that this is not your gentlemanly, pseudoscientific, Louis Bromfield approach to country living. This book is as genuine as a Ball jar with wire bale and rubber-ring sealer, as personal as a foal's first breath, the suck of barnyard mud, the snap of a July green bean. No summer gardener in Gucci bonnet, this lady. Kumin strides her bosky hills in four-season boots, fixing fence in spring, battling blackflies in summer, canning assorted manna in fall and thawing water for her beloved horses at 30 below.

When, on a fierce, blizzardy morning, the owner reluctantly puts feet to floor, jacket to frame, dons boots and gloves, and sallies forth to the barn, a chorus of nickers arises from the throats of the Family Horses. The basso profundo of the bossy gelding mingles with the middle voice of the mare. The ecstatic greetings of the yearling filly, sounding in the upper register, override them both.

In truth, this collection could have been titled Horses I Have Loved with a subtitle reading And Wild Mushrooms I Have Gathered. Kumin knows both intimately, but her relationship with the horse is the one with love in it. Here is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who finds sitting up with pregnant mares at night and mucking out stalls in the morning a fine time for creative thinking. Isn't there a moral here for us? Shouldn't we all have a few stalls to muck out?

Kumin takes us back in her woods, in deep, to hunt the wild mushroom, and so precise is her study of this fleshy fungus of the class Basidiomycetes, so helpful her description of what is safe to eat and what is not, that if you will but listen closely and take a few notes, you will never have to count yourself among the six dozen or so mushroom fatalities occurring each year in this country. (“Best of all, go moreling the first season with an old-timer and learn your craft in situ.”)

It was destiny that I read this book, I who have ridden a horse to library as well as to trail, who can remember to this very day and hour the taste of fresh-picked mushrooms fried in cracker crumbs and butter. (It's all right, Maxine, they were morels.)

But all is not horses and mushrooms here; there are also Matters Practical at hand—winter feeding patterns for mixed livestock, the mechanics of maple syrup production, the merits of the mule and the hardiness of Scotch Highland cattle in New England's mizzly weather. Kumin's lee-slope farm is no romantic ivory tower. Don't look for a Brontë sister here; look rather for Hiram Jones of The Old Farmer's Almanack.

There's something for everyone in this folio of pieces. Even if your rural experience totals up to no more than a visit to Grandma's farm one summer, you can still savor the heart-place wisdom of an essay like “The Country Kitchen,” that Action Central of every farmhouse, that immense core room where the food smells swirl, the kids play their games and dye their eggs, where the wood stove pops in rhythm to the wind and the cat lies down with the dog. “Consider,” Kumin says,

the democracy of the country kitchen as opposed to the scullery mentality of the separatist kitchen. … Think how many daily transactions take place in the country kitchen. How many feet enter, cross and leave it from first light to bedtime, year-round. … Merely the steady rhythm of the life of the farm and the people who live here. Making all seasons better.

This is a thoughtful, intimate book about a life in which you cut your own wood and grow your own food. Maxine Kumin could bask equally in Emerson's tribute to an earlier New England poet-naturalist, Henry David Thoreau: “It seemed as if the breezes brought him / It seemed as if the sparrows taught him / As if by secret sight he knew / Where, in far fields, the orchis grew.”