Kumin is understandably a popular poet. She is an intelligent and sensitive woman who writes on the enduring themes of life and death, place and family. Essentially a domestic poet, she takes as her material the world of her everyday life in rural New Hampshire—her home, children, neighbors, land, and animals, especially horses, which she has loved since girlhood. She is a strong woman whose independence is natural, not ideological, and the usual modesty of her tone does not hide her underlying self-assurance. She writes confidently about what she knows—the death of friends, the departures of her children, the landscape around her—and she does so honestly and directly without striking fashionable postures. (p. 652)

There is much to enjoy in Kumin's volume [Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief], especially among the new poems. Her readers will be glad to see further reports on her engaging neighbor, Henry Manley, the eighty-two-year-old Yankee bachelor, whose presence has enlivened Kumin's poetry since his first appearance in The Nightmare Factory. There is also a very moving group of poems about her brother and his brave struggle against the crippling nervous disease which killed him, and there is an affecting elegy for her friend, Anne Sexton, written "on being interviewed by her biographer." The people in Kumin's poetry come alive. She captures their personality and makes her affection for them contagious.

Yet with all these strengths, there is a curious thinness to Kumin's verse. She uses language in a skillful but utilitarian way. It is a medium to communicate the facts of her poetry, and even in her formal poems one finds little evidence of joy in language for its own sake. The rhymes seem forced and incidental, the metrical pattern filled out rather than exploited. Even Kumin's most lyrical outbursts sound flat and perfunctory, as in the climax to "Sunbathing on a Rooftop in Berkeley."….

Perhaps it is … [her] dependence on "the exact truth" that sets the limits on Kumin's achievement. When her poems succeed, they do so mainly on the strength of the characters they introduce, the scenes they describe, the stories they tell. While her language presents the subject matter clearly enough, it rarely heightens it sufficiently to make the exact words definitive. Her poems are moving without being memorable. Ultimately Kumin is a writer who has applied her diligence more to exploring her own life than to the possibilities of her medium. (p. 653)