[In the following review, Howes praises the "country ways" of Up Country.]

Maxine Kumin is a poet attuned to country ways. She is heir to a tradition of pastoral poetry that reaches back through Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy all the way to its rural beginnings in Theocritus. Nature poetry, she comes to tell us, is alive and well and sinking its taproots in New Hampshire soil.

Whether she writes of a woodlot in winter, tadpoles hatching in the spring, of berrypicking or a night visit from a mosquito, she brings to her page what Wordsworth called "the harvest of a quiet eye." Her eye is on the object—the tininess of "the shrew's children, twenty to a teaspoonful;" the near invisibility of minnows—"a see-through army in the shallows / as still as grains in a rice bowl"; the ambiguity of strange markings left in new snow. What made the marks?

It could have been a raccoon
lugging a knapsack,
it could have been a porcupine
carrying a tennis racket,
it could have been something
as supple as a red fox
dragging the squawk and sputter
of a crippled woodcock.

Up Country is the fourth book of poems by this Boston-based poet and novelist. Neither surreal nor shrill, neither tragic nor transcending, Mrs. Kumin's poems sing with the music of the middle voice, sing of reality beheld with imagination, sing the world made meaningful by the perceptions of the beholder. Up Country is good news for all listeners to whippoorwills, inspectors of beaver dams, connoisseurs of the hazel nut and the honey mushroom.