Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia. She was educated at Radcliffe College, where she received an A.B. in 1946 and an M.A. in 1948. She married Victor M. Kumin in 1946, and they have three children....
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Dickey was an American educator and poet who served as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, 1966-1968. In the following review of Halfway, he comments that "Kumin is more successfu...
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In the following interview conducted by high school students at Interlochen Arts Academy, Kumin answers questions about her work, in particular, her methods of writing. She also provides some advice f...
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In the essay below, written in 1977, Kumin surveys her "tribal poems" or "poems of kinship and parenting" and the examines the recurrent theme of parent-child separation.
A...
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Estess is an American poet and critic. In the following essay, she analyzes the ways in which Kumin faces loss in The Retrieval System.
The Retrieval System, Maxine Kumin's sixth book of poetry...
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Wakoski is an American educator and poet. In the following review of Nurture, Wakoski—while stating that "Kumin's vision is sometimes limited"—admires the poet...
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Here, Cole appraises Nurture, commending Kumin for her continued depiction of environmental issues and her modesty, which he describes as "divine translucence," in her verse.
Maxine Kumi...
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In the following excerpt, Harris commends Kumin's intimate and tender poems in Nurture. He states that with this volume the poet is seeking "atonement."
Maxine Kumin labors under ...
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George is a poet, educator, and critic. In the following review of Looking for Luck, she describes Kumin "as a survivor who knows her survival is only temporary, she uses poetry to come to term...
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In the following excerpt, Baker highly regards Kumin's work and points out that "it is nature that evokes her most passionate, exact writing, and provides a significant model for her to ...
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In the following essay, George examines how Kumin confronts the loss of friends and family and her own mortality in her later poetry.
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to th...
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Below, the reviewer notes themes similar to those in Kumin's previous work, in particular examining relationships among people, animals and nature; and "observing the moral responsibilit...
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Stuart is an American educator and poet, and has served as poetry editor and eventually editor-in-chief of Shenandoah since 1976. Below, he admires Kumin's control of her subject matter, the do...
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Wallace is an American educator and poet. In the following excerpt, he lauds The Privilege for its direct language.
Maxine Kumin's new poems [in The Privilege] are superb. She hardly makes a mi...
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Oates is a prolific American educator, author, and critic. In the review below, she compares Up Country to Sylvia Plath's Winter Trees, remarking on the similarities and differences between the...
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In the following review, Howes praises the "country ways" of Up Country.
Maxine Kumin is a poet attuned to country ways. She is heir to a tradition of pastoral poetry that reaches back t...
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Mills is an American poet who has written several critical studies on contemporary poets. In the following excerpt, he congratulates Kumin for her "marvelously etched, intricately textured pict...
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In the following interview with Showalter and Smith, Kumin and poet Anne Sexton discuss their twenty-year-old friendship and its influence on their poetry.
Max and ITwo immoderate sisters,Two immoder...
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In the following interview, Kumin discusses her poetry. She declares that "in the process of writing, as you marshal your arguments, as you marshal your metaphors really, as you pound and hamme...
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Below, Ferrari praises House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate for its "finely crafted structures" and "powerful, personal images."
Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for her poems ...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
It's hard to know what to say about Maxine Kumin's new volume ["House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate"]. It suffers from a disease of similes: child...
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Critical Essay by Barbara Fialkowski
The fields of Maxine Kumin's new book of poems, House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, are fusions of the external and internal worlds a poet must confront. They ar...
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Critical Essay by Philip Booth
[The maturity of Maxine Kumin's poems] is the uniquely lovely maturity of a woman who has never forgotten the girlhood she has long since outgrown.
The values The...
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Critical Essay by Harvey Curtis Webster
Maxine Kumin thinks of Anne Sexton as her "best friend"; they lunched together cheerfully the day before Sexton killed herself. They shared a sens...
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Critical Essay by Richard Moore
Maxine Kumin is an accomplished and professional poet of what might be called the Bishop-Lowell-Sexton school. More important, when she has a subject she can write movi...
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Critical Essay by Alicia Ostriker
Which of her poetic peers does Maxine Kumin resemble? Unlike Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, she keeps her demons bridled. Unlike Elizabeth Bishop or May Swenson, she i...
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Critical Essay by Dana Gioia
Kumin is understandably a popular poet. She is an intelligent and sensitive woman who writes on the enduring themes of life and death, place and family. Essentially a dome...
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Critical Essay by Choice
[The Privilege contains] intensely felt poems about deep-reaching family relationships, sharply realized memories of childhood, and odd, ambiguous, and elusive emotional exper...
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Critical Essay by Mary Carter
"It's like a bad dream," says a character in "The Passions of Uxport." "Something happening to somebody else. A soap opera on TV...
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Critical Essay by David J. Gordon
[Maxine Kumin's] powers of observation, interpretation, and phrasing are as strong as Updike's and less marred by moral perversity, excessive symbolism,...
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Critical Essay by The Virginia Quarterly Review
One is impressed by several qualities in [the poems collected in Maxine Kumin's The Nightmare Factory]: depth and range, delicately controlled ye...
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Critical Essay by Jascha Kessler
Maxine Kumin's sixth collection of poems is called The Retrieval System, and it is a generous gathering of 35 poems. I would characterize her work as straightfo...
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Critical Essay by Monroe K. Spears
[Maxine Kumin] is not much anthologized or discussed, and I suspect that many readers have been aware of her, as I was until recently, only as a name. At any rate, i...
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Critical Essay by Julie Stone Peters
Maxine Kumin, who has earned a reputation for poems of such bright beatitude that she is an unlikely bard of the geriatric, has entitled her new collection Our Gro...
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Critical Essay by Clara Claiborne Park
One can only cook with what's in the cupboard, Mary Ellman wrote some years ago, speaking of fiction by women. And that, if not entirely true, is true eno...
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In the following review, Schulman comments on the themes and style of The Long Approach.
Maxine Kumin's poetry is, at its center, profoundly human. Throughout her work, she has displayed a toug...
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In the following review, George explores the major themes of Looking for Luck, situating them in the context of Kumin's career.
With Looking for Luck, her tenth volume of poetry, Maxine Kumin j...
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In the following excerpt, Baker praises Kumin's achievement in Looking for Luck, focusing on the rhetorical schemes and aesthetics of simplicity that inform her poetry.
Maxine Kumin is, and for...
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In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus evaluates Women, Animals, and Vegetables in terms of the relationship between isolation and the creative process.
[Maxine] Kumin's new book Women, Animals, a...
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In the following review, Reedy examines the eastern American biases and upper-class assumptions that she finds in Women, Animals, and Vegetables.
Maxine Kumin writes her stories and essays [in Women, ...
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In the following excerpt, McDowell considers the honest intimacy of Connecting the Dots.
Maxine Kumin's eleventh book of poetry, Connecting the Dots, will do nothing to diminish her considerabl...
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In the following review, Buttel examines the themes, tone, and structure of Connecting the Dots.
In this eleventh collection of her poems, [Connecting the Dots] Maxine Kumin continues in a vein that h...
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In the following excerpt, Kitchen commends the spirit of Connecting the Dots, praising Kumin's rejuvenation and urgency in such familiar themes as nature, survival, and memory.
Maxine Kumin was...
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In the following review, Tillinghast surveys Selected Poems, 1960-1990, assessing Kumin's contributions to “nature” poetry.
This selection of work [Selected Poems, 1960-1990] by M...
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In the following review, Howard attributes the thematic coherence and “eclectic curiosity” of Connecting the Dots and Selected Poems to Kumin's “remarkable” consiste...
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In the following review, St. Andrews assesses Selected Poems within the context of Kumin's career.
Back in the good old days when Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country (1973), bein...
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In the following review, Dieter praises Kumin's exploration of the rural experience in In Deep: Country Essays.
How long has it been since you were invited to a farm home in the New Hampshire h...
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In the following positive review, Barrington examines the appeal of Always Beginning and Inside the Halo and Beyond.
I recently had the pleasure of re-reading Virginia Woolf's essay, “Ho...
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In the following review, Padnos outlines the major themes of In Deep: Country Essays, focusing on Kumin's daily routine and her relationship with her horses.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxi...
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In the following excerpt, Miller offers a positive assessment of In Deep: Country Essays.
Nature writing is essential, if only to remind us that there may still exist what Thoreau, perched on Mt. Ktaa...
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In the following review, Christophersen contrasts In Deep: Country Essays with Wendell Berry's Home Economics, highlighting the respective strengths and weaknesses of each.
Wendell Berry and Ma...
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In the following review, Hunt compares In Deep: Country Essays to Brenda Chamberlain's Tide-Race, emphasizing their thematic similarities.
What is waiting on the other side? Maybe nothing speci...
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In the following review, George highlights the environmental themes in Nurture, noting a movement in Kumin's verse toward global and ecological issues.
In Nurture Maxine Kumin continues to expl...
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In the following excerpt, Cotter argues that survival is the primary theme of the poems in Nurture.
Maxine Kumin in Nurture, her eighth collection of poetry, describes a return to ancestral Austria in...
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In the following review, Cole offers a positive assessment of Nurture, praising Kumin's “affectionately modest demeanor.”
Maxine Kumin is a senator for man and beast and earth. Sh...
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Maxine (Winokur) Kumin
