Maxine Kumin thinks of Anne Sexton as her "best friend"; they lunched together cheerfully the day before Sexton killed herself. They shared a sense of woman's bondage by both nature and society. Though they have written occasionally of social matters …, neither has written poems of social protest comparable to Adrienne Rich's. Both have concentrated on their individual lives as subject matter…. [At] her worst (a rarity in her last two books), Kumin is too New Yorker-sophisticated…. Kumin uses similes more than Sexton, though sometimes her metaphors (the potatoes' "ten tentative erections") shock in the best sense of the word…. Kumin, who is [hard] to pin down, is represented rather well by her reluctant wearing of dead Sexton's clothes in "How It Is." Most of Kumin's poems turn from inside to outside…. Although Kumin can write a poem entitled "Heaven as Anus," and close one of her best poems with the line "I honor shit for saying: We go on," an appropriately startling conclusion to a poem that epitomizes The Retrieval System, usually it is her homely similes one remembers: cows wear "their flies like black tears"; she prays the Lord will raise her up each day "like bread." In their accurate specificity, Kumin's poems surpass Sexton's and rival [Peter] Davison's.
Kumin is almost consistently good as she diversifies her daily life into poems. Sometimes in The Retrieval System—a fine binding metaphor for all the poems in her current book—Kumin echoes Frost's rhythms and whimsy a shade too closely, as in "Extrapolations from Henry Manley's Pie Plant"; sometimes she is cutely obscure, as in "Song for Seven Parts of the Body." Usually she converts her own experience into anyone's experience without losing its particularity. (p. 232)
Harvey Curtis Webster, in Poetry (© 1979 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), January, 1979.
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