Jack and Other New Poems (review)

At a time when contemporary poetry rewards linguistic pyrotechnics and the disjunctive, the heft and heart of lyric poetry like this, with its muscular lines, air-born and earth-bound, serves up a startling refreshment. In Maxine Kumin's fifteenth collection we find a bracing mix of persona poems, elegies, and lyric narratives, the stuff of biting paradox and stark self-appraisal. Rarely has the pastoral read like anything but.

At age seventy-nine, Kumin, hiking the old growth woods of her New Hampshire farm engages the rigor of her body and her mettle which continue to be inextricably bound up with that of her poems. It is all there in the work, the daunting pleasures, the vigorous drive, and now, the lucidity and the lament of the limitations that comes with aging and proximity to death and near-death.

Kumin started publishing her poetry when the Help Wanted ads in the New York Times were still separated by gender, when the poetry world was resolutely dominated by men, and only a handful of nationally recognized poets were women. She carved a place in the canon with the steady voice and steely grace that landed a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, and continues to fuel her distinctive and enduring presence in American poetry.

In Jack and Other New Poems Kumin tackles the big subjects: mortality, the body, family, community, her literary legacy. Though the poems about loss and death outnumber the others, one poem "Ode," written in nine neat tercets, strikes a chord that might be a page of Kumin's life-long play book for its attention to the body, feminism, and grit:

Upside down and backward windmilling through sometimes satin sometimes sullen murk, sun a tatted doily intercut by overhanging pines and hemlock, gliding not too close to either shore, water flowing in and out of me as I scoop deep behind me, stroke scoop and fling hands' – sprayfuls straight-armed again and again I salute you Eleanor, who outswam them all back- stroking left right somersault touch push off, churning the Olympic gold in 1932

This "Ode" goes on to "raise a glass to" Eleanor Holmes, kicked off the team for drinking champagne and shooting craps with Helen Hayes aboard the cruise ship SS Manhattan. The language of the body and the water "flowing /in and out of me" in this poem echoes an earlier Kumin masterwork, "Morning Swim," and casts this champion swimmer against the tide of the times she lived in. One can't help but consider the poet's identification with the swimmer she salutes in this poem.

Kumin embraces the world we live in now, in poem after poem, as she examines death. In "Summer Meditation," the speaker wants "to sing / of death unbruised. / Its smoothening. / I want to prepare / for death's arrival / in my life."

The deaths of horses, a dog, a sack of kittens, intermingle with that of a friend, her father, her brothers, and the contemplation of her own. Kumin slips back and forth between the human and the animal, in what the poet and critic Emily Grosholz calls "a poetry of metamorphosis." In her essay, one from a collection Grosholz edited: Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin (University Press of New England, 1997), Grosholz argues that "with the studied uncanniness of Ovid, she allows them to combine, body and soul."

That said, Kumin examines, with great compassion, how animals meet death, and how we, their partners with language understand it. In "Which One," the relentless narrator saves her steely side for the human species when she asks, "which one of you discarded in a bag – sealed with duct tape – in the middle of the road / three puppies four or five weeks old . . ." Kumin, the poet, humanist, lifelong animal activist ends with a jolting indictment: "I look for you wherever I go."

In this collection, every poem is a portrait of the poet's fierce hold on life. For an agnostic approaching eighty, perhaps the poem itself is as an act of...