Maxine Kumin is an accomplished and professional poet of what might be called the Bishop-Lowell-Sexton school. More important, when she has a subject she can write moving and memorable poems. The best of those in her second book, The Privilege …, are a series of evocations of childhood. In "The Spell," for example, that enchanted garden we can all remember (and which has been popping in and out of modern verse for quite some time now) suddenly becomes startlingly real and alive with supernatural presences, including a mother who seems like the God in Genesis. (pp. 29-30)

One can see in [some of the poems collected in The Privilege a] witty manner which—along with striking descriptions evoking unexpected senses—is Mrs. Kumin's main way of making poems. Sometimes she seems grimly determined to be witty, and this can distract one from a good poem, as with "The Praying...