SOURCE: A review of Up Country, in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1973, pp. 211-24.

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 pictures" of New England in Up Country.

Maxine Kumin is like [Denise Levertov,] a poet of the trained eye and the exact word, though without the visionary proclivities and the desire for new sonic and organic forms which Denise Levertov seeks. The poems of Up Country are selected from several sources, including previous books of Mrs. Kumin's, and compose a series of marvelously etched, intricately textured pictures of different aspects of New England life and countryside that fewer and fewer Americans know. The central location for these poems is a farm in southern New Hampshire where, one gathers, Mrs. Kumin and her family live part of...