[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 Retrieval System values … are primarily conservational. The book in no way presents itself as any kind of "breakthrough" experiment; it isn't Life Studies or Ariel, nor does it want to be. It is, rather, prime Maxine Kumin, who has simply gotten better and better at what she has always been good at: a resonant language, an autobiographical immediacy, unsystematized intelligence, and radical compassion. One does not learn compassion without having suffered, but poems like "Splitting Wood at Six Above" amply show that suffering doesn't require confession to validate pain. Maxine Kumin's mode is memorial rather than confessional: in celebrating the past, and her own part in its passing, she celebrates in herself the very capacity to survive.
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