Maxine Kumin is an accomplished and professional poet of what might be called the Bishop-Lowell-Sexton school. More important, when she has a subject she can write moving and memorable poems. The best of those in her second book, The Privilege …, are a series of evocations of childhood. In "The Spell," for example, that enchanted garden we can all remember (and which has been popping in and out of modern verse for quite some time now) suddenly becomes startlingly real and alive with supernatural presences, including a mother who seems like the God in Genesis. (pp. 29-30)

One can see in [some of the poems collected in The Privilege a] witty manner which—along with striking descriptions evoking unexpected senses—is Mrs. Kumin's main way of making poems. Sometimes she seems grimly determined to be witty, and this can distract one from a good poem, as with "The Praying Fool." At other times her manner seems to keep her from finding her subject. In "The Appointment," for example, there is vividness; there is experience behind the vividness; but the poem, one feels, is needlessly coy about that experience. In other poems the tangible part of a metaphysical conceit works loose and develops a life of its own, and again the subject tends to get lost.

But with so many fine poems (there are some excellently lush love poems in the final section that makes me think of The Song of Songs), one musn't quibble too much about a few Mrs. Kumin is a real poet. (p. 30)