In the following essay, George examines how Kumin confronts the loss of friends and family and her own mortality in her later poetry.

In the following interview, Kumin discusses her poetry. She declares that "in the process of writing, as you marshal your arguments, as you marshal your metaphors really, as you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form, the order—the marvelous informing order emerges from it, and it's—I suppose, in a sense, it's in the nature of a religious experience."

In the following interview with Showalter and Smith, Kumin and poet Anne Sexton discuss their twenty-year-old friendship and its influence on their poetry.

In the essay below, written in 1977, Kumin surveys her "tribal poems" or "poems of kinship and parenting" and the examines the recurrent theme of parent-child separation.

Estess is an American poet and critic. In the following essay, she analyzes the ways in which Kumin faces loss in The Retrieval System.

In the following interview conducted by high school students at Interlochen Arts Academy, Kumin answers questions about her work, in particular, her methods of writing. She also provides some advice for future writers.

In the following excerpt, Harris commends Kumin's intimate and tender poems in Nurture. He states that with this volume the poet is seeking "atonement."

In the following positive review, Barrington examines the appeal of Always Beginning and Inside the Halo and Beyond.

[The maturity of Maxine Kumin's poems] is the uniquely lovely maturity of a woman who has never forgotten the girlhood she has long since outgrown. The values The Retrieval System values … are primarily conservational. The book in no way presents itself as any kind of "breakthrough" experiment; it isn't Life Studies or Ariel, nor does it want to be. It is, rather, prime Maxine Kumin, who has simply gotten better and better at what she has always been good at: a resonant la...

In the following excerpt, Kitchen commends the spirit of Connecting the Dots, praising Kumin's rejuvenation and urgency in such familiar themes as nature, survival, and memory.

In the following review, George explores the major themes of Looking for Luck, situating them in the context of Kumin's career.

George is a poet, educator, and critic. In the following review of Looking for Luck, she describes Kumin "as a survivor who knows her survival is only temporary, she uses poetry to come to terms with as many permanent losses as possible before the final one."

In the following review, Howard attributes the thematic coherence and “eclectic curiosity” of Connecting the Dots and Selected Poems to Kumin's “remarkable” consistency with the themes, techniques, and ironic perspectives that distinguish her career.

In the following review, Buttel examines the themes, tone, and structure of Connecting the Dots.

In the following review, Tillinghast surveys Selected Poems, 1960-1990, assessing Kumin's contributions to “nature” poetry.

Wakoski is an American educator and poet. In the following review of Nurture, Wakoski—while stating that "Kumin's vision is sometimes limited"—admires the poet's Earth poetry, especially "the wonderful images, that turn into big metaphors."

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.

In the following excerpt, Baker highly regards Kumin's work and points out that "it is nature that evokes her most passionate, exact writing, and provides a significant model for her to instruct or explain people to us."

In the following review, Hunt compares In Deep: Country Essays to Brenda Chamberlain's Tide-Race, emphasizing their thematic similarities.

Maxine Kumin, who has earned a reputation for poems of such bright beatitude that she is an unlikely bard of the geriatric, has entitled her new collection Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, as if in honor of "the aging poets, old friends" she refers to in one poem. This sprint toward the finish line wouldn't be surprising in a young poet (or young as well-known poets go) habitually prone to the death watch, a poet, say, with Galway Kinnell's inclination for the volcanic nightma...

In the following review, Cole offers a positive assessment of Nurture, praising Kumin's “affectionately modest demeanor.”

In the following review, Dieter praises Kumin's exploration of the rural experience in In Deep: Country Essays.

In the following review, Christophersen contrasts In Deep: Country Essays with Wendell Berry's Home Economics, highlighting the respective strengths and weaknesses of each.

Mills is an American poet who has written several critical studies on contemporary poets. In the following excerpt, he congratulates Kumin for her "marvelously etched, intricately textured pictures" of New England in Up Country.

Oates is a prolific American educator, author, and critic. In the review below, she compares Up Country to Sylvia Plath's Winter Trees, remarking on the similarities and differences between the poets' writings and concluding that "one book affirms life; the other affirms death."

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 l...

Here, Cole appraises Nurture, commending Kumin for her continued depiction of environmental issues and her modesty, which he describes as "divine translucence," in her verse.

Below, Ferrari praises House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate for its "finely crafted structures" and "powerful, personal images."

[Maxine Kumin] is not much anthologized or discussed, and I suspect that many readers have been aware of her, as I was until recently, only as a name. At any rate, if there are such readers, I have good news for them: Kumin is very much worth discovering, and [Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief and Why Can't We Live Together Like Civilized Human Beings?] are an excellent introduction. (p. 1) The arrangement [of Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief] is reverse chronological, beginning with the latest wo...

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....

In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus evaluates Women, Animals, and Vegetables in terms of the relationship between isolation and the creative process.

Which of her poetic peers does Maxine Kumin resemble? Unlike Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, she keeps her demons bridled. Unlike Elizabeth Bishop or May Swenson, she is bawdily personal. Like Adrienne Rich, she makes us pay respectful attention to images of strong female identity, yet she avoids ideology. And is there another poet who finds or invents such a sweet male alter ego [as Henry Manley, the country neighbor who is one of the several recurring figures in "Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief&#x...

In the following review, Reedy examines the eastern American biases and upper-class assumptions that she finds in Women, Animals, and Vegetables.

In the following review, George highlights the environmental themes in Nurture, noting a movement in Kumin's verse toward global and ecological issues.

[Maxine Kumin's] powers of observation, interpretation, and phrasing are as strong as Updike's and less marred by moral perversity, excessive symbolism, and fine writing. But her novel [The Passions of Uxport] is as preoccupied as his [Couples] … with animal decay and the struggle to conquer the fear of death. And her narrative also suggests that sexual loss though not the whole of this fear, is central to it. Hallie's mysterious stomach pain, which sends her eventually to a psyc...

In the following excerpt, Miller offers a positive assessment of In Deep: Country Essays.

Stuart is an American educator and poet, and has served as poetry editor and eventually editor-in-chief of Shenandoah since 1976. Below, he admires Kumin's control of her subject matter, the domain of childhood, in The Privilege.

In the following excerpt, Cotter argues that survival is the primary theme of the poems in Nurture.

In the following review, St. Andrews assesses Selected Poems within the context of Kumin's career.

Kumin is understandably a popular poet. She is an intelligent and sensitive woman who writes on the enduring themes of life and death, place and family. Essentially a domestic poet, she takes as her material the world of her everyday life in rural New Hampshire—her home, children, neighbors, land, and animals, especially horses, which she has loved since girlhood. She is a strong woman whose independence is natural, not ideological, and the usual modesty of her tone does not hide her underlying self-...

Dickey was an American educator and poet who served as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, 1966-1968. In the following review of Halfway, he comments that "Kumin is more successful in personal poems than in those which attempt public stances."

The fields of Maxine Kumin's new book of poems, House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, are fusions of the external and internal worlds a poet must confront. They are her gardens and she as poet has been about naming their flora and fauna. Kumin has said that the poet must be "terribly specific about naming things … naming things that already exist, and making them new just because the names are so specific … bringing them back to the world's attention … dealing with names t...

In the following excerpt, McDowell considers the honest intimacy of Connecting the Dots.

"It's like a bad dream," says a character in "The Passions of Uxport." "Something happening to somebody else. A soap opera on TV." And, as Maxine Kumin's second novel unrolls, its domestic crisis and rhythmic interlocutions are also sharply reminiscent of series TV. The Davises struggle with Sukey's death-wish and suffer the loss of their only child to leukemia. The Peakeses battle reciprocal adultery, the pregnancy of an unmarried niece, the ps...

In the following review, Padnos outlines the major themes of In Deep: Country Essays, focusing on Kumin's daily routine and her relationship with her horses.

It's hard to know what to say about Maxine Kumin's new volume ["House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate"]. It suffers from a disease of similes: children "naked as almonds," kisses "like polka dots," a corset spread out "like a filleted fish," someone "patient as an animal," a visit "as important as summer," chromosomes "tight as a chain gang," and genes "like innocent porters" all inhabit one...

Wallace is an American educator and poet. In the following excerpt, he lauds The Privilege for its direct language.

Maxine Kumin thinks of Anne Sexton as her "best friend"; they lunched together cheerfully the day before Sexton killed herself. They shared a sense of woman's bondage by both nature and society. Though they have written occasionally of social matters …, neither has written poems of social protest comparable to Adrienne Rich's. Both have concentrated on their individual lives as subject matter…. [At] her worst (a rarity in her last two books), Kumin is too New Yorker...

Below, the reviewer notes themes similar to those in Kumin's previous work, in particular examining relationships among people, animals and nature; and "observing the moral responsibility of daily life."

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 sup...

In the following review, Howes praises the "country ways" of Up Country.

In the following review, Schulman comments on the themes and style of The Long Approach.

One is impressed by several qualities in [the poems collected in Maxine Kumin's The Nightmare Factory]: depth and range, delicately controlled yet forceful emotion, and the unobtrusive presence of formal devices. Miss Kumin never settles for superficial treatment of her material although she deals with an extensive range of subjects. From her "pastoral" poems, which move beyond the idyllic to realistic cycles of birth and decay, through her "tribal" poems, in which she man...

[The Privilege contains] intensely felt poems about deep-reaching family relationships, sharply realized memories of childhood, and odd, ambiguous, and elusive emotional experiences of adulthood. Miss Kumin's clipped, nervous verse line (even when run-on), which seems unusually consonantal in sound, proves highly various and adaptable, easily meeting the demands of the sonnet form, of which the poet provides far too few since she produces a most authentic contemporary sonnet when she tries. She is re...