Connecting the Dots

by Maxine Kumin

Overview

"Kumin's is a poetry of wide sympathy and tact in which the ecumenical flavor is dominant. . . . This collection is full of generational severance and renewal, and a tart and compassionate irony."—The New Yorker

In these new poems, her eleventh collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet focuses on the themes of family, friendship, the pleasures and rigors of rural life and the animal world that have always engaged her powerfully and fruitfully. Change and the things that never change attract Kumin's attention equally. Whether chronicling the bounty of summer, the cycle of seasons, or memories of youthful parties, her voice is clear, wise, and compelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393316957
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/1998
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.30(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.

Editorial Reviews

The process referred to in the titleand finalpoem of Kumin's 11th collection is the ability to take care of one's business, personal and metaphysical. Here, the poet is aware that her grown children, on their visits home, gently assess her ability in this regard. Kumin is indeed still taking care of the same business that has absorbed her throughout her career: noting the connections among family members; tracking the relations among people, animals and the natural world; and observing the moral responsibility of daily life. Her customary candor and irony are still present, as in her recollection of her youthful religious imagination and the demands her faith might make on her: "I didn't know how little risk I ran/ of being asked to set my people free... I didn't know the patriarchy that spared me/ fame had named me chattell, handmaiden." Although some poems are less substantive than others ("Vignette" is little more than its title suggests), others are memorably strong, particularly the poems about her mother and a number of vivid elegies. In "New Year's Eve 1959," Jack Geiger is recalled dancing with Anne Sexton, "...pecking his head to the beat/ swinging her out on the stalk of his arm/ setting all eight gores of her skirt/ twirling." In "After the Cleansing of Bosnia," Kumin constructs startling and sophisticated images that connect her expatriate daughter as a child and as an adult, the continuing cycle of world sorrow and the mysterious beauty of her rural life. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kumin, bless her heart, just gets better and better. Since her first volume appeared in 1961, Kumin's poetry has deepened in its involvement with the stuff of life that matters: inner wisdom, the interconnectedness of everything and everyone, the scope and definition of love. These are the kind of poems one wants to share with family and friends, to savor again and again. The first poem, "Letters," consists of seven near-sonnets about the poet's mother; the final line of each sonnet is, with small variation, the first line of the next, moving the reader insistently and compellingly from section to section. Kumin's movement from childhood's close maternal bond to viewing her mother through adolescent scorn to a final shared and friendly adulthood explores themes of universal mother-daughter relationships. Kumin writes vividly of domestic and untamed animals (dogs, horses, bears"this sow wearing a halo of insistent gnats") and of her gardeneven of its failures ("But let me lament my root-maggot-raddled radishes/ my bony and bored red peppers/ that drop their lower leaves like dancehall strippers"). And the music she makes of language within these poems is compelling: "the tick/ and thrust of seeds inside the sleet's sad tune." A high point is the final set of poems, memorials to dead friends, among them poet Anne Sexton. Every poem in this collection is a treasure.Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward

Library Journal