Maxine Kumin's sixth collection of poems is called The Retrieval System, and it is a generous gathering of 35 poems. I would characterize her work as straightforward, ruminative, prosaic, and pleasant to read: she is intelligent and thoughtful; she is also at the prime of her own life, her mid-Fifties, and in a position to speak plainly and with a kind of personal authority that convinces the reader. She is also writing a poetry of retirement, so to speak, of observation, of civility and domesticity. This is, when one thinks of her work in that way, a poetry that partakes of a very ancient and widespread tradition, in the Classical World, in the Orient, and the Middle East. That is, the poet has grown up in cities, and been educated at good schools, the poet has been cultivated in the literary life of the times, but then, towards middle age, the poet has gone into the country to live, not as a peasant or a farmer, but the life of the gentleman, or in Kumin's case, the wife of a country squire. There is no necessity involved, and there is leisure and satisfying work: the animals to be cared for, the orchard to be overseen, the kitchen garden, and the more or less easygoing life of the New England countryside, with its seasons, its woods, its excursions. I think the effects of this will always be noticeable in such poetry: a narrative form of meditation; images of domestic and rural life reflected upon; the world is there but at a distance; the immediacy, the poignant immediacy of the seasons; the sorrows and joys and hurts of association with tamed animals, the odd local characters; the fates of one's parents and friends and of one's children; all of which give the poet occasions to weep private tears, to reflect on the world's constant change and pressures; on the fact of death, others' and obviously one's own; this quiet background encourages dreaming, dreaminess and slowly-congealing judgments on the self and on life in general, judgments that are weighted by slowpassing country time, that grow and ripen like fruit or ooze from life's wounds like gum on a fruit tree, hardening slowly into a form of amber, a turgid sap from the quick of one's being, exposed on the hard bark of the outer self for all to see. Kumin's made statements intelligible; that is we can easily recognize ordinary human emotions, simple joys and deep griefs over our losses: she is not melodramatic, morbid, or sensational, as her close friend Anne Sexton was, and about whom she offers here a few intimate poems; and she is not able to excite us by her use of language or show any interesting technique. In short, the poetry in this book is the poetry of herself, of her day to day life. And that has always been the main feature of the civilized poet in the rustic life of retirement. It is a poetry that offers the reader genuine country products, organically grown, so to speak, the fruit, the berries, the walks through the four Northern seasons, the glimpses of the domestic life, glimpses both wry and sad, as befits a woman in middle age….
And as befits the poetry of ripe middle-age, and rustication, which implies that the future can hold few surprises or breakthroughs; exaltation and ecstasy are not to be looked for: most of the poems are elegies, grieving poems: mourning for the dead, one's parents and one's friends, and for one's losses, the losses of children, or their inevitable disappearance over the horizon into their own difficult lives. The title poem of the book, "The Retrieval System," sets the theme for the other 34 poems. I'm not very happy with its trendy, jargonical metaphor, but the poem is a good one, a grave one, and the book elaborates on it.
Jascha Kessler, "Maxine Kumin: 'The Retrieval System'," in a radio broadcast on KUSC-FM—Los Angeles, CA, January 31, 1979.
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