Still to Mow (review)

Fifteen previous books of poems have established Maxine Kumin as a poet of accessible complexity and quiet erudition, a keen observer of the natural world, and one of our foremost technical virtuosa. Still to Mow gifts us with poems rich yet clear in their tonal layerings, noble in purpose yet concrete in articulation, chiseled yet mainstream-genial.

Still to Mow accrues urgency and ethical tension as we swerve from the first section’s “Landscapes” to the political poems of “Please Pay Attention” and to the revisionist narratives of “Turn It and Turn It,” then back to the introspective landscapes of “Looking Back.” There’s a beautifully orchestrated, but not contrived, cohesiveness to this collection whose private and public journeys may appear, at first, incongruous, but whose underlying concerns emerge from a shared sense of necessity—a necessity that roots and commits the self in/to the world.

The opening poem, “Mulching,” a tour de force and most apposite overture to a volume whose very title suggests both pending responsibility and replenishment, situates the speaker in the private space of her vegetable garden, where she’s knelt to spread “sodden newspapers between broccolis, / corn sprouts, cabbage and four kinds of beans.” But how can one turn into nurturing mulch “this stack of newsprint” that is all “wanton deed” and “heartbreak”—suicide bombings, starvation, “lines of people / with everything they own heaped on their heads,” “the first torture revelations”? This disquieting moment in which the horrors of our times and the polluted realms of politics interject and contaminate the speaker’s self-contained world and sustaining ritual reverberates throughout the volume, supplying its most memorable tenor. And if in this first poem the speaker sees herself as “a helpless citizen of a country” she “used to love,” with no choice but “to root in dirt, / turning up industrious earthworms, bits // of unclaimed eggshell, wanting to ask / the earth to take [her] unquiet spirit, / bury it deep, make compost of it,” in later pieces she will grow much more forceful in her indictment of “venal human nature.”

Though sterner in tone and vision than previous volumes, Still to Mow remains affirming in the attention and dignity it bestows on both natural and human worlds. Kumin’s celebratory arc/ark includes trustful and familiar dogs and horses, “electric blue” buntings, goldfinches who’ve “exchanged their winter costumes / for strobic lozenges of yellow,” “purple cabbage hued so deep” it stains fingers and countertops magenta-blue, and “perfect parsnips” “pried / from the black gold of old soil.” However, as Kumin reminds us with clear-eyed apprehension and biting irony, we seem intent on degrading this world and pushing it toward imminent extinction. Pen-reared pheasants and mallards are “rattled into flight” for our politicians’ hunting guns, dogs are deployed in torture practices, and thirty-seven thousand beetles are “tweezered into place with glue, / their metallic backs—think armor in Iraq—dulled by killer liquid” so they can compose a “papier-mâché / faux bas relief of a Japanese / beetle made of beetles.” That we rate hardly any better in our treatment of other human beings comes as no surprise, and Kumin’s juxtapositions of the human and the natural world often serve as reminders of the ubiquitous power and resurgent nature of cruelty. In “Revenge,” a poem that explores the dynamic between beauty and violence, pleasure and repression, and need and hypocrisy, beech leaves “curl undefended” and the oak leaves look

bruised the color of those insurgent boys Iraqi policemen captured purpling their eyes and cheekbones before lining them up to testify to the Americans that no, no, they had not been beaten . . .

The poems gathered under “Please Pay Attention,” and to which the quoted poem belongs, speak with the authority and fearlessness of a parrhesiast whose redoubtable integrity does not allow her to close her eyes to injustice or “stain the sky with indifference.” “It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us,” Robert Hass resolves (as he echoes W. H. Auden’s words) in his poem “The Problem of Describing Trees,” and Kumin...