If poetry could save the world, "Nurture" would be the ark.
From The New York Times, November 5, 1989. Copyright ? 1989 by the New York
Times Company.
Review of Kumin’s Nurture
Christina Robb
In "Nurture," Maxine Kumin moosefoots, bearfoots, dogfoots and cowfoots
through a score of lyric poems about animals, whom she mostly loves. But she never
pussyfoots. Thinking about saving a baby kangaroo by using a pillowcase as a surrogate
pouch, she admits frankly in the very first, title poem:
I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue.
They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims, from an overabundance of
maternal genes.
And then she daydreams about saving a wild child:
Think of the language we two, same and not-same might have constructed from sign,
scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel:
Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.
Kumin has loved to write about animals since she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in
1973, but she also loves to be with them, in the language of silence and solidarity that
nature knows best. The sacrifice of a summer’s crop of beans is worth the hour she
gets to spend watching a bear eating beans in her garden, but she notices the sacrifice,
in "Encounter in August." It is worth it to her to quote a man named Roscoe
Black in "In the Park" about the way a grizzly bear "laid on me not doing
anything," but she notices that he should have said "lay."
This tension between her sympathy with the grammarless bultitude of animals (to use a
wonderful word C.S. Lewis made up for plump, staggering animality) and her love of precise
speech creates both the rough and the smooth places in Kumin’s work.
Even when she is writing about humans, she is writing about human animals. She has been
with too many horses at the moment of birth (as she is again, magnificently, in
"Sleeping with Animals") to think for a second that her baby grandson is
something different in kind from a foal.
In "We Stood There Singing," she writes about an unforgettable minor
"moment of civility among women": While Kumin and her daughter were traveling
through Switzerland, a shopkeeper let her and her daughter into the bedroom in back of her
shop so they could diaper Kumin’s screaming grandson. And then the shopkeeper "opened
her arms/ and bounced him chortling around the room/ singing him bits of le bon roi
Dagobert." This civil moment has exactly the same tone of animal kinship as Kumin’s
words about rooming-in with a pregnant horse: "Together we wait for this
still-clenched burden."
Robert Bly has written that every poet should take care of animals as part of her or
his preparation, and Kumin has been certified and recertified in animal care as fully as
any poet ever. She knows animals so well that she can identify "With the
Caribou," and with penguins "In Warm Rooms, Before a Blue Light," though
she’s never cared for them on her upcountry farm.
But every now and then, the focus of her sincerity leaves the beast and lands on the
word — so that in a poem like "Repent," a catchy and cleverly rhymed defense of
the killer whale, we get a lovely feel for the words without any sense of the animal.
Two-thirds of the 61 poems in this collection are about travel and family. In two poems
about Austria, Kumin travels back into family history while she’s visiting the places
where her Jewish family lived before Hitler.
Later, she travels back to her friendship with Anne Sexton — and here, "On Being
Asked to Write a Poem in Memory of Anne Sexton," she produces a poem perfectly
balanced among her loves for animals, words and special people. She compares her tormented
friend with an elk, discarding and regrowing ever-larger antlers every year:
No matter how hardened it seems there was pain.
Blood on the snow from rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.
She uses lots of off-rhyme and muted meter in these poems, and in some of the best of
them, we hear straightforward rhyme and fairly straight pentameter. "Marianne, My
Mother, and Me," the first poem in the most personal third of the book, and the
longest poem in the book, is a rhymed and metered genogram. It takes the lives of the poet
Marianne Moore, who was an inspiration for the young Kumin, and Kumin’s musical, haute
bourgeoise mother, "both shapers of my alphabet," in time lines running beside
one for Kumin herself. The poem is a beautiful act of witness. And this time, too, Kumin
finds the words without reaching past her vision or her love:
The poet becomes her beast in armor and shell, a woman adept at the wittiest
camouflages;
but under them always lurks the shy red-haired girl …
From The Boston Globe, June 2, 1989. Copyright ? 1989 by Globe Newspaper
Company.
Review of Kumin’s Novel Quit Monks Or Die!
Laura Jamison
Throughout her long career, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin has written
frequently about her profound connection to animals. "Thoreau continues to be my
mentor in every way," she said in 1992. But Kumin is no wide-eyed idealist: she
understands that certain aspects of the human character make achieving harmony with nature
tricky. The narrator of her poem "Woodchucks," for example, obsessively stalks
the rodents who are devouring her garden, describing herself as "a lapsed pacifist
fallen from grace / puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing." Self-interest, it
seems, can awaken aggression in even the gentlest soul.
Now, in her fifth novel, "Quit Monks or Die!," an unusual animal rights
mystery, Kumin continues to study the conflicting impulses of altruism and aggression that
reside in all of us. Set in Montandino, an imaginary southern California town near the
desert, "Quit Monks or Die!" opens with a crime: two squirrel monkeys, a mother
and baby, have been stolen from the Graysmith Lab, where they were intended for use in
maternal-separation experiments, ostensibly to shed light on human responses to the same
trauma. Another, more shocking crime follows: the lab’s director, Hal Baranoff, turns up
dead, his body found in the same pit where he used to drop monkeys and observe their
decline into catatonia. Next, the director’s graduate assistant and mistress, a
calculating redhead named Felicity, is discovered murdered.
Kumin is effective in sketching the characters that populate this small town — a
Latino sheriff with Anglo aspirations (Diego, who likes to be called Digger); a former
member of the Mercy Bandits, an animal rights terrorist group — as well as the arid
landscape that houses them all. Not surprisingly, Kumin is a capable stylist, and she uses
her edgy prose to form what can be unexpectedly tawdry story lines: Hal and Felicity, for
example, enjoy a sex life that includes rubber cat suits, handcuffs and amyl nitrate. Hal
likes to be "spanked in a Super 6 … threatened with an enema as she stood over him
in her white nurse’s outfit." Felicity thinks that it’s "a textbook fact that
famous men like to be disempowered sexually." This aspect of the plot, however, feels
a bit too "textbook."
There are moments, in fact, when one fears having been seduced into reading animal
rights propaganda parading as literature. At a Jenny Jones-style talk show, for example,
audience members stand up and make informed, sophisticated arguments against medical
experiments on animals, offering a level of discourse that would hardly sell the
advertising slots such lowbrow daytime programming commands. Likewise, Hal is such a
villain that he once turned up the volume on his radio to drown out the cries of his first
baby daughter, who died in her crib, apparently from sudden infant death syndrome, while
he listened to Mozart. Perhaps the ambiguities and complexities poetry affords Kumin on
the subject of animals are more difficult to manage in the form of a novel.
As the characters develop, however, their complicated psyches are challenged by
archetypal tensions, and thus the book’s allure takes root. Hal has a twin brother, Vance,
with whom he shares a mutual lifelong animosity and with whom, unbeknown to Hal, he shares
a woman: Hal’s wife, Susie. (The paternity of Susie’s children, the sweet-tempered twins
Rachel and Reuben, is unclear.) When Vance becomes an ardent animal rights activist, he
must wonder whether his newfound political cause is born of concern for animals or hatred
for his brother, whose career depends on his cruel experiments. Again, self-interest has
the power to confuse, if not corrupt, the generally good-hearted.
The outcome of the book’s central mystery disappoints, but Kumin’s highly original
prose and her provocative analysis of human nature captivate. When Vance ponders the death
of his selfish twin, he concedes that Hal "was my other self." Here the reader
is implicated: Hal is our other self, too.
From The New York Times, September 26, 1999. Copyright ? 1999 by The New York
Times Company.
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