Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin (born June 6, 1925, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 6, 2014, Warner, New Hampshire) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and children’s author. Kumin’s novels were praised in literary circles, but she was best known for her poetry, written primarily in traditional forms, on the subjects of loss, fragility, family, and the cycles of life and nature.

After graduating from Radcliffe College (A.B., 1946; M.A., 1948), Kumin taught English at several colleges. In the 1950s she met the poet Anne Sexton, who influenced her stylistic development and with whom she collaborated on several children’s books. Kumin’s first book of poetry, Halfway, was published in 1961. The Privilege (1965) and The Nightmare Factory (1970) address issues of Jewish identity and family and of love between men and women. Kumin’s New Hampshire farm was the inspiration for her collection Up Country: Poems of New England, New and Selected (1972; Pulitzer Prize, 1973). Critics compared Kumin to Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau for her precise, unsentimental evocations of rural New England and the rhythms of daily life.

Additional works include the acclaimed The Retrieval System (1978) and Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (1982), which continued her reflections on nature and death, including Sexton’s 1974 suicide. Kumin’s use of metre, rhyme, and structure became increasingly sophisticated. From the 1980s she began to address social issues in her poetry; some critics thought this weakened her work. Her Selected Poems, 1960–1990 was published in 1997. Later collections such as Jack and Other New Poems (2005), Still to Mow (2007), and Where I Live (2010) continue to mine Kumin’s abiding interests in country life and family while expanding to encompass seemingly disparate topics, from the Iraq War to the deaths of beloved pets.

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Kumin’s numerous children’s books, including When Grandmother Was Young (1969) and Mites to Mastodons: A Book of Animal Poems, Small and Large (2006), also reflect her love of family and the natural world. The short-story collection Why Can’t We Live Together Like Civilized Human Beings? (1982) further explores issues of loss and relationships between men and women. Kumin again demonstrated her ability to buck genre constraints in her 1999 animal-rights mystery Quit Monks or Die!

In 1998 Kumin was in a severe carriage-driving accident. She chronicled that experience in her memoir Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (2000). Kumin also penned several collections of essays, among them Women, Animals, and Vegetables (1994) and Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (2000), that contain prose meditations on many of the recurrent themes of her poetry: womanhood, nature, and family. Kumin served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (now poet laureate consultant in poetry) from 1981 to 1982 and poet laureate of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1994.