And Short the Season

by Maxine Kumin

Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, a stunning collection of poems that course with the rhythms of nature.

A poet of piercing revelations and arresting imagery, Kumin is "unforgettable, indispensable" (New York Times Book Review). In And Short the Season she muses on mortality: her own and that of the earth. Always deeply personal, always political, these poems blend myth and modernity, fecundity and death, and the violence and tenderness of humankind.

From "Whereof the Gift Is Small"

And short the season, first rubythroat
in the fading lilacs, alyssum in bloom,
a honeybee bumbling in the bleeding heart
on my gelding’s grave while beetles swarm
him underground. Wet feet, wet cuffs,
little flecks of buttercup on my sneaker toes,
bluets, violets crowding out the tufts
of rich new grass the horses nose
and nibble like sleepwalkers held fast—
brittle beauty—might this be the last?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393241006
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/07/2014
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Maxine Kumin (1925—2014), a former U.S. poet laureate, was the author of nineteen poetry collections as well as numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. Her awards included the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the Poet’s Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost medals.

Table of Contents

I Whereof the Gift Is Small 19

The Path, the Chair 20

A Day's Work 24

Our Mantle 26

Purim and the Beetles of Our Lady 28

Discrete Activities 30

Indian Pipes 32

The Furtive Visit 34

Elegy Beginning with Half a Line from Ben Jonson 35

Rosie Speaks 37

The Luxury 38

II Ancient History in the Eye Center 43

Murder 45

Radford, Virginia, 1904 48

The Revisionist Dream 51

Taken Inside 52

The Bird, the Court of Common Pleas, the Czar 54

The Last Good War 56

The Standing Roast 57

Wellfleet, Cape Cod 58

No Place 60

National Velvet 62

III Old News 65

Red Tape and Kangaroo Courts I 66

Red Tape and Kangaroo Courts II 67

The Pre-trial Confinement of Private Bradley Manning 68

Sonnets Uncorseted 69

IV At the End 81

Xanthopsia 82

Howl Revisited 84

On Speaking Terms 85

Mourners, Onlookers, Gawkers 86

Seeing Things 89

The Women Return from Digging Roots in the Kalahari 90

The Last Word 91

Truth 92

V Ah, Poetry 95

William Carlos Williams 96

Provincetown, Cape Cod, 1963 98

The Day My Student Teaches Me That Life Is Not Art 99

Cabbages 100

Either Or 102

Going Down 103

Just Deserts 105

Pallas's Horse 106

This One 107

Allow Me 108

Editorial Reviews

03/31/2014
There’s a brightness to Kumin’s posthumously released collection (after Where I Live) that makes it hard to believe the Pulitzer winner and former U.S. poet laureate passed away recently at age 88. Across her body of work, exquisite pastorals of her New Hampshire farm mix with politics and echoes of past poets, possessing a directness that makes each piece necessary and vital. Kumin does not delve into personal pain, though she skims the surface, giving cool-handed hints into what it means to be mortal. “The Revisionist Dream” explores her friend Anne Sexton’s suicide: “Well, she didn’t kill herself that afternoon./ It was a mild day in October, we sat outside/ over sandwiches.” Kumin’s poetic career, like Sexton’s, began at a time when women weren’t welcomed warmly into the literary fold. She observes, “modern/ women poets were dismissed as immature,/ their poems pink with the glisten of female organs.” Her mastery of form lays hidden in the ease and spontaneity of her language. The stunning “Seeing Things” transposes the lush language of her pastorals onto the landscape of “harmless visual hallucinations.” “When I go blind, I ask him, will I still see them?/ —They will always be with you, he said. Try to befriend them.” Kumin has left us a fittingly strong and subtle final work. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Unlike many of her contemporaries, including Anne Sexton, Kumin knew how to trim the deadness around her, letting the life come through for decades… Short the season, but long the legacy."

Bust - Amber Tamblyn

"Filled with joy, sorrow, anger, mortality, politics and horses."

Shelf Awareness - Tom Lavoie

"Kumin is as graceful and unsparing as ever… One of Kumin’s best aspects as a poet was her regard for words, which she held as precious as any other living thing."

Boston Globe - Michael Andor Brodeur

★ 03/15/2014
Thoughtful and observant, these poems by former U.S. Poet Laureate Kumin (Where I Live: New and Selected), just deceased, cover trusted ground: aging, death, rural life, and reverence for animals. It's not only topic and theme that inform her writing but deftness of language, rhythm, and music, as evidenced by these lines: "I watched the taillights judder as you took/ the downhill elbows of the mudslicked lane" and "Wet feet, wet cuffs,/ little flecks of buttercup/ bluets, violets crowding out the tufts." Kumin writes formal as well as rhythmic free verse, here including a series of sonnets that detail war atrocities as well as sonnets in homage to Margaret Cavendish, 17th-century scientist, poet, and feminist. Language and memory instill Kumin's poetry with resonance; she tells us "Saving is a form of worship" and memory a particular way to save and savor. Whether she writes of Elizabeth Taylor's first love, portrays a piebald horse, or compares the lives of Thomas Hardy and Michael Jackson, Kumin proves again, with style, compassion, and vibrance, that she still has much to say. VERDICT Highly recommended reading from an esteemed poet.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal