Which of her poetic peers does Maxine Kumin resemble? Unlike Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, she keeps her demons bridled. Unlike Elizabeth Bishop or May Swenson, she is bawdily personal. Like Adrienne Rich, she makes us pay respectful attention to images of strong female identity, yet she avoids ideology. And is there another poet who finds or invents such a sweet male alter ego [as Henry Manley, the country neighbor who is one of the several recurring figures in "Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief"]?…

Typical of Maxine Kumin's art are the sensory weight, the play of alliteration and assonance sliding into the closing couplets, the perfectly expressive halting and crystallizing rhythms [in the poems about Henry]….

Mirroring his creator, Henry Manley is a supervisor, a capable countryperson of multiple skills. He will die before the poet does, and he is one of her many means of studying mortality. He is also what she is not, or can be only through him: an isolé. He is alone, not looking back. For her, not looking back would be intolerable.

"Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief" contains selections from Maxine Kumin's first six volumes as well as 29 new poems, all but one of them gems; the book amounts to 20 years' solid work. Her Pulitzer Prize winning "Up Country" comes just about halfway, both in chronology and in power, rather like Frost's imagined wanderer to the edge of doom, she is not changed, only more sure—so that her poems become increasingly unforgettable, indispensable. What drives her throughout is attachment. If she had her way, no loved (or hated) human or animal would die unremembered. Thus she writes not only the usual kinfolk poems but "Sperm," a tragicomic celebration of 17 look-alike cousins….

Children, especially daughters, keep cropping up, growing as they go, from Mrs. Kumin's earliest work to her most recent. No poet writes more richly and more subtly of mother-daughter relations. Or, for that matter, of animal-human relations, since her attachment and attention extend to the forms and gestures, the detailed lives and deaths of mice, turtles, frogs, goats, beavers, cows and calves, sheep and lambs, and—most powerfully—horses. Creatures surround her; she sees and touches them; she foresees their doom. At times—see "Woodchucks" or "How It Goes On"—she is their doom's guilty agent. At times—see "Thinking of Death and Dogfood" or "A Mortal Day of No Surprises"—she contemplates the uses of horseflesh and her own potential to sweeten a crop, and wishes her mare and herself good endings. I believe that Thoreau would commend her honesty, the precision of her language and her occasional moral allegory. (p. 10)

Besides the poetry by which she is best known, Mrs. Kumin writes charming children's books and good readable fiction. Her four novels, thick with human physicality and human decency, like her poems tend to concentrate on sex and love. This is also the case in her first collection of stories, "Why Can't We Live Together Like Civilized Human Beings?"

The narrator of the title story, a documentary film maker who meets and loves a colleague at a film festival behind the Iron Curtain, answers the title's question, to her own unhappy satisfaction, by believing "in the infinite depravity of man." Another answer is that love sustains civilized individuals only intermittently. Almost all of Mrs. Kumin's protagonists are reasonable people in middle life, enduring situations they do not quite choose….

High violence and high passion take place offstage in these stories, though never far offstage. Maxine Kumin's writing emanates from the bodies of her characters, delivering their senses and sense together as a poet's writing should, and invites us to recognize our destinies in theirs. (p. 22)