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 not flamboyant or destructive but decently maintained—"another form of marriage," as the title of one story [in Why Can't We Live Together Like Civilized Human Beings] has it. Kumin's is the fiction and poetry of maturity. It is significant that in selecting the poems for Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, she has chosen to reverse the usual chronological order, opening with twenty-nine recent poems, then working backward through six previous collections: youth is seen from the perspective of late middle age. That perspective too is familiar….
Kumin's well-made poems and stories are two ways of coming at the same immemorial preoccupations: aging and mortality—"That time of year thou may'st in me behold"—or as Frost put it, "what to make of a diminished thing." Indeed, our ground time here will be brief.
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