In a simple and calming language, her near rhymes (bagful, cattle; yellow, fallow) are subtle and musical, all of which create a serene observation.

The book’s first section is also full of absent voices — from the former composition student to Dorothy Wordsworth, and a friend lost too soon to Keats. In “Come, Aristotle,” she ends with this stanza:

Filled with concrete objects and strong imagery, such an invocation evokes the ghost of Aristotle, brings him into the ordinary, and resurrects him at an afternoon meal with good company. The direct address allows for a familiarity with the past and present, which is a comfort for the reader and speaker.

If the first section is filled with the ghosts of others, the final section of the collection is full of her own ghosts — a poem for Anne Sexton, poems on leafleting in her college years, and works about her being a young mother in tumultuous political times.

To love this poet’s work is to hear it; in “Looking Back on My Eighty-First Year”, we can. It sets up for regret and longing opening with the line, “Instead of marrying the day after graduation,” and goes on to examine the could-have-beens, before ending with these last three tender stanzas:

This tone is of fondness, an erasure of regret, of satisfaction with a life well-lived. The simplicity in “Marriage dizzied us” is deeply relevant to the movement and frenzy that life may take on… If only we all could look back on a life such as this, acknowledge these gifts, and render them as only Maxine Kumin can.