SOURCE: "Creature Comforts," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. IX, No. 8, May, 1992, p. 17.

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 terms with as many permanent losses as possible before the final one."

With Looking For Luck, her tenth volume of poetry, Maxine Kumin joins the Norton stable of writers. I'm usually uncomfortable with that term, but for Kumin, the horsewoman-poet of American letters, it's appropriate. For decades she has written about the connections between humanity and the rest of the folk who inhabit the world. In Looking for Luck she continues this and other themes—death and loss, family and legacy, how to survive devastation and celebrate life.

The poems here are often about the intervention of imagination in the...