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. An instructor and lecturer at Tufts University from 1958 to 1961 and an adjunct professor of writing at Columbia University in spring 1975, she has also been a visiting lecturer at such institutions as Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Washington University, Princeton University, and the University of Massachusetts. Her work has been recognized with the Lowell Mason Palmer Award (1960), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1966-1967), the Poetry Society of America's William Marion Reedy Award (1968), Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1972), and the Pulitzer Prize (1973, for Up Country, published the previous year).

Life may not be wholly rational, Maxine Kumin says in her poetry, but it is to some degree manageable. In a period when most contemporary...