Still to Mow
BY Maxine Kumin
(W.W. Norton, 2007)

Maxine Kumin is a poet who is present in the world, from the scrutiny of the garden to the realities of current politics — her purpose has been to observe and report. Her poetic gift that celebrates the natural world and the everyday is evident in her sixteenth collection, Still to Mow, as she juxtaposes these poems with the urgency of a political response.

Still to Mow opens with the poem “Mulching,” which covers a substantially wide array of subjects and social concerns — from dirty knees in the soil to horrors across the globe in AIDS and tsunamis, she uses language to methodically till words and experience. Her awareness of a life well-lived pervades the collection. Because of this, her voice and witness as a poet is critical, now more than ever, from both an individual and universal point of view. This poem sets us up for much of what she will cover in the book — celebration of the everyday, response to unrest both past and present, and the awareness of mortality. “Mulching” ends with the lines, “in this stack of newsprint is heartbreak, / my blackened fingers can only root in dirt, / turning up industrious earthworms, bits // of unreclaimed eggshell, wanting to ask / the earth to take my unquiet spirit, / bury it deep, make compost of it.”

The poet reflects her frustration at the world’s larger mistakes throughout the collection, but it is in her first section, “Landscapes,” that she celebrates being here now, being present, and finding peace in the everyday. She epitomizes, in particular, the state of being present in “Today”:

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.