Maxine Kumin Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Clara Claiborne Park

Critical Essay by Clara Claiborne Park

One can only cook with what's in the cupboard, Mary Ellman wrote some years ago, speaking of fiction by women. And that, if not entirely true, is true enough. Fortunately, a lot accumulates in the cupboard as time goes on. Maxine Kumin's poems, like her fiction, mine a life whose elements might seem too familiar to be promising material for the storyteller or the poet—too familiar, at any rate, to (as we once used to say, instead of merely think) "people like us." People like us read The Nation, or at the very least The New York Times Book Review. They are administrators, teachers, translators and such—the kind of people who fly in planes to address meetings in distant cities. In other moods, they demonstrate at the Pentagon…. They are not carried away by passion, though they panic sometimes; their marriages last more often than not, and their adulteries are...
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