SOURCE: Baker, David. “Ecstasy and Irony.” Poetry 161, no. 2 (November 1992): 99-113.

In the following excerpt, Baker praises Kumin's achievement in Looking for Luck, focusing on the rhetorical schemes and aesthetics of simplicity that inform her poetry.

Maxine Kumin is, and for a long time has been, one of our most widely praised poets. Her tenth collection of poems, Looking for Luck, is representative of her accomplishment, style, and vision. She writes like a lot of poets these days; or, more likely, many try to write like her. Her poems are never qualified by anything less than maturity, grace, and sureness of touch. It's as if her strong, good poems were found rather than composed. As if. Altogether appropriate for an ars poetica is Kumin's favorite figure of the horse, as companion and model:

Whenever I caught him down in the stall, I'd approach. At first he jumped up the...