One of America’s most acclaimed poets, Maxine Kumin, the former U.S. poet laureate, is the author of eighteen books of poems, as well as works of fiction and non-fiction. Kumin has won many prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for literature. And Short the Season is described as her final collection, and the poem ends with what she wants to be her final poem.
Allow Me
Sudden and quiet, surrounded by friends
__John Milton’s way __
But who gets to choose this ordered end
Trim and untattered, loved ones at hand?
__Allow me that day.
Kumin is a nature poet. Living in New Hampshire, she immerses herself in all that she sees, all that grows and moves and breathes, all that she believes life is, and life can be. A friend to many poets, both emerging and well-known, she was caught up, in the eighties, in identity politics. Describing how she sees herself in an essay in a book called The Roots of Things, she says, “My identity as a Jewish woman is simply one more descriptive epithet that accompanies other labels that adhere to me: poet, equestrienne, essayist, organic vegetable farmer, fiction writer, grandmother, even hermit.” She grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and attended a convent school because it was near her house. The experience prompted the kind of fruitful cognitive dissonance that animates so many of her poems. In one she writes, “One day I said I was Jew / I wished I had. I wanted to.”
She is prolific and well-published. She writes poems, essays, children’s books. A true craftsman, her poems are often called masterful, elegiac, funny, even joyful. Reading her poems is an experience of sitting with a friend, a wonderfully talented friend who can describe all of life, in a poem.
The Last Word
It’s a winner
But how
Do you get
It in without
Jimmying
The lock when
The argument
Crescendos
And reason
Lies prone, winded?
There you are
Up against
The door
When suddenly
Passion
Flings it open
And calmly,
Calmly,
You walk in.
Related content:
