[In the following essay, George examines how Kumin confronts the loss of friends and family and her own mortality in her later poetry.]

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

—Martin Heidegger

A decade ago I began a sustained reading of modern and contemporary women poets on the subjects of memory, mortality, and aging in the literature of the life cycle. Exploring Denise Levertov, May Sarton, Marie Ponsat, May Swenson, and Muriel Rukeyser, I found that the writing of women poets on aging is confrontational, angry, tender, and unashamed. Their works indicate that they wish to do the work of aging, and of facing their own deaths, with fearlessness. But their poetry records the process of confronting their fear rather than the accomplishment of having defeated it. Theirs are poems of death and loss, and they would permit me no wishful projection that mature poets of demonstrated achievement, and presumably personal wisdom, had come entirely to terms with mortality or aging. What I did find was that such poets use their fears, deliberately and creatively. Their works embody the fact that we all, as we age, tally our losses, remember what has passed, think of our personal histories, our families, our unfinished business.

Memory and loss have always been among Maxine Kumin's primary subjects, and in that respect her poetry has consistently shared the preoccupation that becomes more concentrated in older poets. When Kumin was in her fifties, she wrote a series of elegies to deal with the loss of Anne Sexton, whose biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook was a controversial best-seller of 1991. Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin had been dear friends from the time they met in a Boston poetry workshop in the late fifties until Sexton's death by suicide in 1974. Their friendship surprised many people in the poetry community because they seemed to be opposites in almost every respect, both personally and poetically. Sexton, though she became a fine crafter of poetry, was unschooled and unintellectual, whereas Kumin was steeped in the great traditions of English formalism. Sexton's apprenticeship began in the mental asylum, Kumin's in universities and libraries. Sexton wrote uninhibitedly about her own madness and suicide attempts, but Kumin's early work was restrained, formal, decorous. In person Sexton was outgoing, often flamboyant, while Kumin's style was understated. Yet for seventeen years, they were inseparable, raising their children together, enduring deaths and losses, and always keeping the work at the heart of their lives. They workshopped their poems together over kitchen tables and telephones year after year, serving as each other's editors as well as soulmates and sisters.

The ultimate contrast between them became survival: Sexton chose to die, and Kumin chose to live. Cast by Sexton's death into the personal and poetic role of "survivor," Kumin spoke of endurance in direct connection to life-cycle issues. Now in her sixties, Kumin continues to represent and embody the survivor. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she makes it a matter of stubborn celebration as well as of constant, subtle, necessary mourning. The mourning of loss, particularly of loss generated by mortality, remains fundamental to her poetic vision. Her recent poetry, especially Nurture (1989) and Looking for Luck (1992), develops and sustains the terms of survival and endurance first fully articulated in the period following Sexton's death.

Here I discuss Kumin's elegies to Anne Sexton, especially as they apply to the issues of aging, loss, and survival for the living poet. I also look at the ways in which the representational aspects of poetic language make her poetry not only elegiac but in some respects epitaphic. The mourning of loss generated by mortality and the representation of absence remain fundamental to her recent poetry and to what I would call her poetics.

Kumin's poems to Sexton demonstrated the double haunting of lyric elegy—the poet haunted the dead as she herself was haunted. Through the dream site of elegy, Kumin attempted in the late 1970s and early 1980s to come to terms with her own middle age and her mortality. She "gathered up our words," both to fend off aging and to ready herself for it. While Sexton remained in the perpetual youth purchased by the flight from life, Kumin grew into the middle age that transformed her from the dead poet's "sister" into her "mother." Kumin's haunting by Sexton is overlaid by the living poet's words, carved as a monument to her (and our) mortality.

The five poems to Anne Sexton in Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (some reprinted from The Retrieval System) participate in an old poetic tradition: an address by a living poet to a dead poet much loved or admired. Sexton's death left Kumin, as she says in "Apostrophe to a Dead Friend," with a tremendous burden to carry, "like a large infant, on one hip": "I who am remaindered in the conspiracy, / doom, doom on my lips". The large infant is carried on the hip of a poet past her childbearing years, a woman experiencing the aging her friend escaped and preparing for the death Sexton embraced in an untimely hurry. Kumin knows she will never fully recover from this loss. How could it be otherwise, for the poet-sister left alive, who wears the dead poet's clothes, her shoes, who must "put my hands in your death / as into the carcass of a stripped turkey?" Yet this infant, this stripped carcass, instructs the survivor on how to endure into the night of life.

"Where Presence—is denied them, they fling their speech," wrote Emily Dickinson. Poetry has always taken as one of its domains the representation of loss, has always attempted to give body to memory, flesh to ghostly form. Karen Mills-Courts calls the spectral power of the written word essential rather than incidental to poetry; she suggests that poetic language is both epitaphic and elegiac, that every linguistic gesture can be seen as a kind of speaking monument. During the act of writing, every poet becomes, momentarily, a carver of gravestones. Even as one constitutes a self through writing, that self slips away at the moment of inscription, so that the haunting is always double, the gravestone carved always that of the poet as well as whom she intends to memorialize. Wordsworth called the human urge to memorialize in epitaphs our "tender fiction"—we bring the dead to life through the process of inscription.

Especially since Sexton's death, Kumin has engaged in the tradition of the "tender fiction," continuously developing and playing upon the extent to which her poems about the dead become a part of her attempt to ready herself for death. The voice in her poems is her own, however highly mediated it is by representational considerations. She observes death and loss in the barn, the pasture, the woods, as well as in the rooms of her life, with clear-eyed, cleansighted toughness. Life is irrepressibly stubborn and delightful, and throughout her work she knows that it will renew itself, will go on without her. In "A Mortal Day of No Surprises", the speaker watches the abundance of life—a frog in the pasture bathtub, weeds in the zucchini patch, sparrows making their "departmental claims," the dog bringing in "one half a rank / woodchuck no angel spoke up for"—and fits her own into the recurring cycle this way:

When I'm scooped out of here
all things animal
and unsurprised will carry on…
me gone to crumbs in the ground
and someone else's mare to call
to the stallion.

Kumin is thus elaborately aware of how she uses her observations in the natural world and their connection to the fact of her own death. Loss and death are Kumin's dominant themes in the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, in poems to and about her uncles, her brother, her animals, her Anne. And although many of these poems were written before Anne Sexton's death, that death seems to have allowed her to do sustained instead of intermittent mourning. When her poetry grows from solidity to stunning power, it does so in the elegiac tradition, as dirge; nor is this strength divorced from celebration, for it is the infinitely renewed mystery of life, as well as its brutality, that Kumin sings of and mourns. As the survivor who nevertheless knows that anyone's survival is only temporary, she uses her poetry to come to terms with as many permanent losses as she can before that final loss of self. Kumin's own statement on the purposes of poetry reflects her understanding: "I believe very strongly that poetry is essentially elegiac in its nature, and that all poems are in one sense or another elegies. Love poems, particularly, are elegies because if we were not informed with a sense of dying we wouldn't be moved to write love poems. The best love poems have that element of longing in them, that either they'll lose that love or that time will take it away. Behind the love poem there's always that sense of regret, that sense of doom." In this respect love poems are essentially elegiac, for they cast before them what Kumin calls "the premonitory shadow of your own mortality."

In Kumin's poems to Sexton in the early 1980s, the conversation between the live and the dead poet has gone on for nearly a decade; we overhear on occasion. Sexton joins Kumin in every activity of daily life: while she is walking in the woods, cutting and splitting logs, flying over Paris, listening to the pope in St. Peter's Square. Kumin picks up each conversation in medias res, lending a sense of immediacy and intimacy. In all of these poems Kumin entangles her complicated passions toward this dearest friend: she is loving, compassionate, bereaved, betrayed, sometimes ironic to the point of bitterness.

The first line of "How It Is" becomes an underlying theme for the series: "Shall I say how it is in your clothes?" The intimate paradoxes of their sisterhood are continually symbolized by this neat, biographical, entirely feminine detail: Kumin's and Sexton's shoe sizes were the same, their clothing sizes close enough that they could share everything from a blue jacket to "public-occasion costumes." Who shares clothes this way? Sisters and friends who call themselves sisters. When Kumin wears Sexton's clothing after her death—"A month after your death I wear your blue jacket"—she is in a sense trying on that other self who died by her own hand to escape old age and despair, to check the fit. "My skin presses your old outline." The question of identity between the living poet and the dead friend becomes and remains central. This otherwise selfpossessed speaker, who knows perfectly well who she is, must keep calling into question that knowledge when she thinks of her friend. Repeatedly the poems declare: I know who I am; and then they ask: but since who I am has so much to do with you, then who am I without you?

Still in Sexton's jacket, Kumin runs the home movie backward, from "the death car idling in the garage," through the rituals Sexton used to prepare for her death that day, to "a space / we could be easy in, a kitchen place" where they sit and speak together, "our words like living meat." The unspoken allusion is perhaps to the dead meat of the body that no longer speaks, for both Sexton and Kumin had used the metaphor of the body as meat. "Our words" is the object of the poet's wish, and also the richly troubled legacy of Sexton's death, as Kumin says in the end of "How It Is": "I will be years gathering up our words, / fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, / leaning my ribs against this durable cloth / to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death."

To "gather up our words" is to claim them, to put them back together, to hoard them as the only constants left, to use them both to mourn what has passed and to celebrate what still lives; it is also to claim them from and give them back to both poets' readers: writing this poem is part of the "gathering." In this first poem Kumin has conflated Sexton's dead absence and her living presence in the doubly haunted metaphors of clothing and words. Now that Sexton has gone, the living poet-friend must wear her clothing and speak their collective words from within the dumb blue blazer of Sexton's death. She must grow slowly, painfully, from within that death, to an acceptance of it; and she must also learn to lean into her aging body and its eventual death.

In "Progress Report," Kumin keeps Anne Sexton informed about how life is without her, two years after her death, and it is here that she is first specific about the aging process. "The middle age you wouldn't wait / for now falls on me" as the speaker walks through the woods, fighting her way through gnats and blackflies. There is less time now, and perhaps less need, for comforting the absent friend or reassuring her that the one left behind understands. Kumin had expected, after all, to share this time of life with Anne Sexton, and since she is alone in the flesh, it is her own dilemma, and not Sexton's, that concerns her. Her eye watches what is permanent: time goes on, marked by regular rhythms and returns, and the only constant is this loss. Last year's scarlet tanager, "a red / rag flagging from tree to tree," lends a "rakish permanence to / the idea of going on without you." The smile in that line is grim; for her "empty times"

still rust like unwashed dogfood cans
and my nights fill up with porcupine
dung he drops on purpose at
the gangway to the aluminum-
flashed willow, saying that
he's been here, saying he'll come
back with his tough waddle, his pig eyes,
saying he'll get me yet.

The haplessly vicious porcupine is more than incidentally connected with Sexton's death: "He is / the stand-in killer I use / to notarize your suicide." No sun-yellow souls here—only the open-eyed, frankly acknowledged desperation of just how bad the bad times are, just how stupidly horrible the natural world becomes when seen through the refracting lens of this senseless death that would not await the natural process of aging.

From this grotesque image of the world gone unaccountably awry, Kumin turns to a vision of possible peace to be wrested from this moment of madness. She notes that Thomas Mann's permit to take refuge in Switzerland said, "For literary activities and the passage of life's evening." She wonders if his loved and dear dead came to him in reverie there, "he taking both parts, working it out." She sees that she has been doing much the same thing with Anne Sexton, "Me taking both parts in what / I suppose is my life's afternoon." She seems to find this both faintly ridiculous and comforting, this dialogue with the dead friend with whom she had always supposed she would have time to work it out. She is compelled to keep talking to this dead love, compelled to both ask the questions and answer them in words she imagines Sexton might say. As in "Splitting Wood," the medium of their communication is dreaming:

Dear friend, last night I dreamed
you held a sensitive position,
you were Life's Counselor,
coming to the phone in Vaud or Bern,
some terse one-syllable place,
to tell me how to carry on.

For both Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, the dream is at the root of poetry. Kumin speaks of "the nightmare of one's choice," as described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness: "One must descend into the abyss and dream the nightmare of one's choice and dream it through to the very end." She will endure the decay of the organism, unpleasant though it be. For the period of her life beginning in 1974, Anne Sexton's death seems to be the nightmare of her choice. Waking from this dream, Kumin swears to Sexton that she

will break
your absence into crumbs
like the stump of a punky tree
working its way down
in the world's evening
down to the forest floor.
("Progress Report")

The movement of the metaphor is double and even contradictory, for Kumin will break Sexton's absence into crumbs that will finally, like the punky tree, disintegrate down into the forest floor. She seems to be saying both that she will finish with this loss once and for all by breaking down what's left of Sexton, forgetting her, learning to be done with the dead, and at the same time that it is only Sexton's absence that will break into crumbs, leaving the distillation of her presence, her very essence.

Another several years pass before "Apostrophe to a Dead Friend." As a continued progress report, "Apostrophe" has many confidences to impart. Everything is still the same; yet everything is different as Kumin ages, as Sexton's death and life recede:

It fades, the glint of those afternoons
we lay in the sun by the pond.
Paler, the intimate confidences.

Even the distances we leapt in poems
have shrunk. No more parapets.
("Apostrophe")

With flat frankness, Kumin details what happens when you stay alive and embrace the aging process. The men have "grown smaller, drier, / easier to refuse;" their mutual children, grown up into "exacting adults," are "no kinder or wiser than we." Kumin won't pretend otherwise. Yet the poem has begun with the same event that began "How It Is" years before; an interview with Sexton's biographer has stripped her back down to "the bones of this person / whose shoe size was your size / who traded dresses in our pool / of public-occasion costumes."

If the years have made her somewhat less sentimentally attached to "the glint of those afternoons," it still takes very little to bring her back to "How It Is." "Apostrophe" ends on the note of doubleness that began it, calling over the chasm of the distance that separates them, yet whispering into the ear right next to her mouth:

Soon I will be sixty.
How it was with you now
hardly more vivid than how
it is without you.
("Apostrophe")

It has been nearly a decade, at the time of this poem, and Kumin has had to develop some distance from that death. As always, Kumin tells her dead friend the truth: that Sexton has faded, that life grows more constricted as we age. The time between Sexton's death and this poem is almost half the number of years of their friendship, and Kumin has been busy living in the intervening years—and changing. For these two women poets who came together over creative acts that included both poems and babies, the "large infant, on one hip" is an especially powerful image. Kumin, old enough to be a grandparent now, carries the weight of the "telling" of this old love like a baby who never grew up. Locked in the past, the "infant" of their relationship has not grown up, or older, with Kumin. Just as Sexton would not wait for her own middle age, Kumin will not be able to stop her own old age from arriving. Perhaps that is the "doom, doom on my lips": she, like Sexton, will someday die, and with her, their old conspiracy.

In "Itinerary of an Obsession," Kumin speaks to Sexton in a voice as newly raw as it is familiar. The isolated notes of bitter irony in the other poems here gather into a chiding chorus of resentment, both good-humored and earnest. The "Obsession" of the title is the speaker's concern with Sexton's death—and with her own as she ages. She is telling Sexton the story of her trip to the Holy Land with a "planeload of pilgrims, / none under seventy."

All through the trip to the Holy Land that this poem describes, we might infer that Kumin, in however secular a fashion, is searching out some spiritual truth. Yet even here she is haunted by visions of Anne Sexton dead, Anne Sexton alive, Anne Sexton resurrected and restored to her.

Sexton's own search was for transcendent sacredness, for a patriarchal God of unquestionable authority and comfort. Kumin's search seems to be for connection of the human sort, transcendent over aging and time. While Sexton searched for God, Kumin searched for whatever it was she had, and lost, with Anne Sexton: a friendship stronger than death, a solidarity of souls that must continue. "Words are the only 'holy' for me. The only sanctity really, for me, is the sanctity of language." That language is the words between friends who are poets—"our words like living meat"—words turned by Sexton's death into a "carcass," which the living poet must try to reconstruct. She can do so, in these poems, only by bringing Sexton back from the grave. And she does so one final time in the last section of "Itinerary," where she finds that even if she "dreams of you less," she is still obsessed:

Still, when the phone rings in my sleep
and I answer, a dream-cigarette in my hand,
it is always the same. We are back at our posts,
hanging around like boxers in
our old flannel bathrobes. You haven't changed.
I, on the other hand, am forced to grow older.
How I am almost your mother's age.
Imagine it! Did you think you could escape?
Eventually I'll arrive in her
abhorrent marabou negligee
trailing her scarves like broken promises
crying yoo-hoo! Anybody home?
("Itinerary")

Recalling their old friendship, one of sisters and equals, the poet asks her dead friend to imagine the impossibility that she has been left to become the age of the monumental parental presence of Sexton's mother, Mary Gray. In these final lines of "Itinerary," Kumin transforms herself into Mary Gray and follows Sexton to the grave, arriving as a gaudy, inappropriately dressed ghost who promises to continue disturbing Sexton's sleep. Because she is now Mary Gray's age, she can take on her identity by the same act through which she has taken on Sexton's identity throughout the series: she is wearing the dead woman's clothes.

As Kumin wanders up the mountain with her body, which she called "Old Paint, Old Partner," in this "sedate roundup" in the "meander of our middle age," looking for the "same old cracked tablets," her "airmail half-ounce soul" touches tongues with "Old Paint"; but "somehow it seems less sure; / somehow it seems we've come / too far to get us there".

It was in part by working through Anne Sexton's death, and through the relationship between Sexton's body, so like Kumin's, and Sexton's soul, that small round entity like a "sun-yellow daisy heart," that Kumin tried in this middle period of her life and her poetry to unite her own body and soul, always uneasy partners. Sexton gave up the search. Kumin was left to puzzle her way through, aware that "our ground time here will be brief."

Since the mature period signaled by the publication of The Retrieval System and building through Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, The Long Approach, Nurture, and Looking for Luck, Maxine Kumin's poetry is fundamentally informed by the mourning of loss, such as we have seen in the Sexton elegies. While her earlier work included occasional poems of mourning for particular deaths or losses, The Retrieval System (1978) announced her clear intention to get down to the necessary business of confronting and then mourning loss, in the lived and in the written life. But this conscious embrace of mourning is not by any means a rejection of celebration. Quite the contrary: to live in the presence of a cultivated (self)-consciousness is to understand the necessity of loss, and to mourn it so that one may continue to live, so that one may experience delight.

The titles of three consecutive Kumin volumes clarify her position. "Fact: it is people who fade, / it is animals that retrieve them." The title poem of The Retrieval System indicates the nature of that system, i.e., the explicit, transmuted recovery of the dead. Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief has its source in the pun on airport announcements between flights; the analogy, of course, is to the shortness of the human life span. And The Long Approach is the approach to death as well as from air to ground. The Sexton elegies appear in Ground Time and Retrieval, where fistfuls of other poems sustain the mood of mourning. "In Memoriam P.W., Jr., 1921-1980," for instance, is a series of five poems for her dead brother.

The P.W. poems are different from the Sexton elegies in that the latter were composed over a period of years, thus most comprehensively signaling continuity in the mourning process; but in her two most recent collections, Nurture (1989) and Looking for Luck (1992), the beloved brother rises again, among the Kumin pantheon of dead aunts, cousins, parents, and living daughters, husband, son, and grandson, all the faces native to Kumin who form the core of the lifelong series she calls her "tribal poems." Even the mother-daughter poems, sustained over a period of decades, take mourning as their primary subject, beginning or ending in the leave-takings of physical or psychic separation.

Kathleen Woodward proposes the recognition of a state in between mourning and melancholia. As distinct from mourning, melancholia is a pathological state of mind, not a normal psychic process with a clear ending. Freud defined it as failed or unsuccessful mourning. Woodward finds that Freud "leaves us here with no room for another place, one between a crippling melancholia and the end of mourning." For some people, she argues, come to terms with their grief by learning to live with their pain. Moreover, she insists "that the distinction between mourning and melancholia has been cut too sharply, that we may point to something in between mourning and melancholia, that we may refer to a grief which is interminable but not melancholic in the psychoanalytic sense." Woodward contends that we all find mourning more difficult yet more familiar as we grow older and losses accumulate—and as we approach our own deaths. In the women poets whose work I explored ten years ago, Woodward's theory certainly holds true: the quality of a continuous, even a cultivated mourning suffuses many of their finest poems, but it is in no sense pathological, dysfunctional, or debilitat ing, not the symptom of a disorder or a diseased mind.

I propose an essential in-betweenness as central to Kumin's vision, even to what might properly be termed her poetics. Perhaps, indeed, a state of continuous and sustained mourning is the necessary province of the poet—in which case Kumin is among its most deliberate practitioners, believing, as we have seen, that poetry is essentially elegiac, that it casts before it that haunting "premonitory shadow of your own mortality." The best lyric poets have always known this. Wordsworth called his poetry a "speaking monument" in The Prelude. And Hopkins expressed it eloquently in "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," where he asks, "Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?" Kumin's speaker knows Hopkins's answer: "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for." I choose the examples of Wordsworth and Hopkins carefully in their connection to Kumin, for it is through the observation of nature, fundamental to the Romantic and post-Romantic vision, that she attempts to come to terms with the blight.

While Kumin herself eschews the practice of theory about poetry, she has commented in her poetry on one of the great theorists, Heidegger.

It is true, Martin Heidegger, as you have written,
I fear to cease, even knowing that at the hour
of my death my daughters will absorb me, even
knowing they will carry me about forever
inside them, an arrested fetus, even as I carry
the ghost of my mother under my navel, a nervy
little androgynous person, a miracle
folded in lotus position.
("The Envelope")

Heideggerean hermeneutics seeks meaning, while deconstruction insists that meaning is only an illusory effect of an illusory system. Karen Mills-Courts uses Heidegger and Jacques Derrida to discuss theories of language that are incarnative on the one hand and representational on the other. Heidegger's central figure is of "gathering" (which we have seen literalized in Kumin's "gathering up our words"), Derrida's of "dissemination." While Heidegger thinks of language as presentational and incarnative, Derrida and deconstruction treat it as ungrounded representation. And while Heidegger insists on the unconcealment of "meaning," Derrida dismantles the very concept. Caught between the fundamental conflicts about the nature of consciousness articulated in our time by these theories, many poets create poetry that is overtly intended to work as "unconcealment," as the incarnation of a presence, the embodiment of a voice in words. Yet, says Mills-Courts, he or she displays that voice as an inscription carved on a tombstone. Poetry must function between the presentational and representational workings of language. It attempts to incarnate meaning and intelligibility, even perhaps Truth; but "no choice between representational and incarnative language is genuinely possible." The speaking monument of poetry presents this contradiction: "The maintenance of presence and its undermining occur in the same gesture."

Poets, aware that their attempts to incarnate meaning are met with the limits of representation, grant poetry the same "privileges" one grants a gravestone. Having written extensively on burial stones, epitaphs, and iconography, I count the privileges of the monument, and our suspension of a certain kind of disbelief in its honor and presence, as considerable. If lyric poems share the province of the monument, their work is monumental in every respect. They assert, as does the memorial, that inscription makes a difference, points to or even creates significance, expresses or incarnates loss, gives body to the memory of spirit, stands meaningfully at the intersection between the living and dead, between consciousness and its end.

Poetry, for Heidegger, reveals to the self its relationship to its own death. "It is true," declares Kumin, "I fear to cease." Heidegger suggests that any evasion of this relationship creates a dearth of meaning. Poets must believe that their work offers, in one way or another, the lighting projection of truth: "This possibility motivates writing. Yet, most good poets have always understood that, as representation, poetry is always threatened by the possibility that words betray truth. As a result, poetry exists in an 'inbetween' state, located on a fine-honed edge between the desire to present the 'thing-itself and the knowledge that language can only stand in place of that thing."

Maxine Kumin enacts the poetic form of this knowledge in any number of her mature works. She is explicit about the self-deceiving "tender fiction" Wordsworth associated with the epitaph form and with all poetic endeavor—and of its necessary attempt to embody presence in the process of composition:

Poetry
makes nothing happen.
It survives
in the valley of its saying.
Auden taught us that.
Next year another
Consultant will sit
under the hand with the arrow
that props the door ajar
for metaphor.
New poets will lie on their backs
listening in the valley
making nothing happen
overhearing history
history time
personal identity
inching toward Armageddon.
("Lines Written in the Library of Congress after the Cleanth Brooks Lecture")

Brooks had spoken of history, time, and personal identity as three touchstones of poetry. Kumin was then the Library of Congress consultant in poetry, thus occupying a ritual place in the history of poetry she sometimes found faintly amusing, perhaps even self-parodic. In "Revisiting the MacDowell Colony," she echoes Hopkins while acknowledging that poets behave as if poetry mattered and as if poetry were connected to Wordsworth's intimations of immortality instead of its opposite. Visiting poets have signed the plaque above the hearth, "as evidence of tenancy and worth," but there are "too many pale ones gone to smudges:" "Use a pen-knife, I advise my friend, / then ink each letter for relief /—as if a name might matter / against the falling leaf." ("Revisiting").

It is such grim but light-hearted parody of poetic vocation that she deploys to make sure she does not take herself, or her vocation, too seriously. But of course she does take it seriously, because she believes in the sacredness of poetic language. What she cultivates is the in-betweenness expressed in poems such as "The Envelope." Here she confronts fear simply and cleanly, but then, once again with combined seriousness and self-parody (another kind of inbetweenness), she indulges in the fantasy of endurance through inheritance, embodying yet another "tender fiction" that is also, in Stevens's famous phrasing, supreme. The second section ends the poem with a half-tongue-incheek hope, intoned through a grammatical construction that both expresses a wish and confers a blessing: "May we, borne onward by our daughters, ride / in the Envelope of Almost-Infinity". This though she knows that it is through reproduction that death announces itself, as she wrote much earlier: "But let there be / no mistaking how the dark scheme runs." The huntsman brings the mother a heart, which she eats, thinking it is the daughter's. "And as we both know, at the appropriate moment / I will be consumed by an inexorable fire / as you look on" ("The Fairest One of All"). But she will have it both ways, alternating between a vision of death that seals a curse and another that confers a blessing. Her own mother's death was good. In her barn she hauls a hay bale, "and with my free hand pull / your easy death along" ("February").

In the work she has completed in her sixties, Kumin contemplates mutability, aging, and mortality by intensifying her alternating gaze: inward toward family and heritage in variations of the tribal poems and outward toward the natural environment. This shifting gaze extends her essential in-betweenness; she looks outward, then inward, outward ward, then inward, as if to say that the two perspectives need each other in order to avoid sentimentality or self-absorption on the one hand or rigid detachment and objectification on the other. The result is what she herself calls her "working distance," one that allows for, even insists on, legitimate forms of intimacy within the constraints of individual consciousness and inevitable difference. The self mediates and interpenetrates the world of the other, the human the world of the nonhuman; body becomes, as nearly as she can envision, the domain of soul.

In the recent Nurture, a volume replete with the doubleness of her acknowledged fictions, Kumin conflates these issues with the other enduring subject of her poetry: the relationship of humanity to nature. The clear and present delights of the natural world and our connections with it as creatures who know we are part of it infuse her sense of responsibility toward more fragile forms of life on the planet we share. She continues to express the necessity of endurance in the face of odds we cannot finally beat.

Kumin's stature as a nature poet, far from distancing her work from the poet of "consciousness," unites the two endeavors in an emblematically modernist Romanticism. While she is largely without the sentimentality we associate with the Romantics in their efforts at union with, and idealization of, nature, they were perhaps less dedicated to that sentimental vision than we have thought. Wordsworth says that the end of the journey in The Prelude is not reunion with nature but a courageous self-consciousness. Much of his writing on nature is explicitly cast as the emblem of a mind, which he is careful not to create as a symbol of unification with nature. Returning to the notion of the "tender fiction," Wordsworth explicitly identifies the notion of simple presence within inscription as such a fiction and relates it to the "intervention of the imagination."

Kumin's consciousness of the interconnections among her visions of nature, mortality, and poetry is usually implicit, functioning as the subtle, never intrusive poetics underlying the poems. When she is explicit, as in "Surprises", it is almost a surprise; but never to be caught treating such sacred terms with reverence—she must remain "in-between"—she couches her hope in the wry intonations of self-parody. For the first time in fifteen years, her red peppers grow and "hang / in clustered pairs like newly hatched sex organs /…. Doubtless this means I am approaching / the victory of poetry over death." A string of associations leads her through her mother's roses, her mother's memories of horses' names in old age, her own coming old age, her mother's baked peppers "full of the leftovers she called"—what else?—"surprises."

Kumin's recent poetry also delineates that we are part of nature as well as its observer, formulator, victim, and victimizer. We must nurture it as it has us, and as it also refuses to do; comfort its creatures even though they can offer us little comfort in return—unless we relinquish our separation from them and lie down with horses, acknowledging that the mortal body (theirs at the mercy of ours) is also the soul. I would say that Kumin—or her poetry, at any rate—does not believe this for a minute, and also believes it utterly. The stakes are high, and consciousness (of mortality, in fact of anything) is the beloved enemy who must be embraced as well as extinguished.

She means us to ponder lovingly the webs of relationship that bind us to fates we both control and, ultimately, share. Stubborn celebration is the dominant tone: she bids us "rejoice to be circumpolar, all of us / on all fours obeying the laws of migration" ("With the Caribou"). She invites our gaze upon the parallels between us and her dog when he carries frogs from place to place in his mouth, "doing what he knows how to do / and we too, taking and letting go, that same story" ("Custodian"). We are better at taking than at letting go. But consciousness combines with nature to teach us that we must.

The animals she returns to most often are her own, who "run like a perfectly detached / statement by Mozart through all the other lines / of my life, a handsome family of serene / horses glistening in their thoughtlessness." She translates their conversation with her, "conveyed in a wordless yet perfect / language of touch and tremor" ("Sleeping with Animals"). Yet she eschews both moralism and sentimentality through an insistence on facing cruelty, predation, stupidity, whether committed by our fellow animal travelers or by us: "Nature a catchment of sorrows. / We hug each other. No lesson drawn" ("Catchment").

The poet finds the tendency to anthropomorphize dangerous because sentimental and falsifying; but its opposite, complete detachment, is equally untenable because it begets the insensitivity that leads to imperialism and destruction. A "being with" and "being in" that approaches but does not reach identification with nature—crucially distinct from anthropomorphism—presents the opportunity to explore continuity in a world of mutability. It is significant that in the purest moments of this "being-with," the poet must relinquish words, which are always, after all, representations of separation brought into "being" by human consciousness. Relinquish words, yes, but not "language," which is more like Mozart's music. The "being-with" is expressed in that "wordless yet perfect / language." It is a language both beyond and before human speech, the only one that escapes consciousness, and therefore knowledge of death. Heidegger said: "Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so, but animals cannot speak." Kumin would correct Heidegger: animals cannot speak, but they do have language. Ironically and appropriately, this indefinable concept, "language," that both includes and transcends poetry, that is shared by the beast and the bard, is one Kumin and Anne Sexton developed together decades ago.

Three poems, one near the end of Nurture, the other two the Prelude and Epilogue to Kumin's new collection, Looking for Luck, bring together Kumin's complex uses of nature in her confrontation with loss and mortality. "Distance" directly expresses the terms of her negotiation with aging. "What does it mean," she asks herself while mowing the lawn, "how / do I, who buried both my parents long ago, / attach my name and number to another birthday?" In part by detaching herself from exclusively gendered sexuality, the reproductive cycle that is also, ironically, the seal of death; she says the old are androgynous, which does not preclude a vision of eros but places it beyond the limitations of genital sex. And in part by acknowledging that life from now on will be that catchment of losses demonstrated to her by the natural cycles around her:

Around me old friends (and enemies) are beleaguered
with cancer or clogged arteries. I ought to be
melancholy inching upward through my sixties
surrounded by the ragged edges of so many acres,
parlaying the future with this aerobic mowing,
but I take courage from a big wind staving off the deerflies,

ruffling and parting the grasses like a cougar if there
were still cougars. I am thankful for what's left that's wild:
the coydogs who howl in unison when a distant fire siren
or the hoot owl starts them up, the moose that muddled
through the winter in the swampland behind us, the bears
that drop their spoor studded with cherry pits in our swales.

If I could free a hand behind this Tuff-Cut
I'd tug my forelock at the sow and her two cubs I met
at high noon last week on the trail to Bible Hill.
Androgyny. Another birthday. And all the while
the muted roar of satisfactory machinery.
May we flourish and keep our working distance.
("Distance")

Once again she shifts between intimacy and separation, claiming her essential in-betweenness. Yet in Luck, where almost half of the poems are concerned with death and loss and with the necessity of continuous mourning, her "Credo" announces that "I believe in magic." The nature of that magic? The "rights of animals to leap out of our skins." In an Indian legend "that instant a bear appeared where a boy had been." Rejoicing in the magic of the wild, she also draws near to the domesticated wildness inherent in "the gift of the horse," who reminds her of her custodianship.

I believe in myself as their sanctuary
and in the earth with its summer plumes of carrots,

its clamber of peas, beans, masses of tendrils
as mine. I believe in the acrobatics of boy
into bear, the grace of animals
in my keeping, the thrust to go on.
("Credo")

In the Epilogue poem, "The Rendezvous," that "thrust" will be expressed in a transmutation of the eros the poet, now in her sixties, seemed to reject in "Distance." This renewed and reclothed, or newly naked, eros transcends the human by wishing for sexual / spiritual union with animals. Employing a legend that says a male bear is able to feel shame—a piece of anthropomorphism she would eschew outside of the poem—she says that a woman encountering a bear is advised to remove her clothes, causing him to run away. But in her rendezvous she slips off her skirt and blouse while he takes out his teeth. Then he works his way out of his pelt, casting it to the ground as a love-rug.

He smells of honey
and garlic. I am wet
with human fear. How
can he run away, unfurred?
How can I, without my clothes?
How we prepare a new legend.
("Rendezvous")

The fiction is tender, incarnative as well as representational. If the epitaph genre records hope as well as fear, celebration as well as mourning, this one could be an epitaph of renewal for the ravaged world at the close of the century, attended to and recorded in the valley of vision where the poet lies down in a destitute time, at the edge of the world's night, uttering her only holy. She is singing the traces of the vanished gods in whom she does not believe, and in whom she believes.