Gently Read Literature, Summer 2012

comes slowly back to improve us: the entire mat of nasturtiums after frost has blackened them, sunflower heads the birds have picked clean…. (“The Brown Mountain”) And always, throughout these selected works, are the many autobiographical poems tying together personal and cultural memory; poems on such quirky topics as “The Victorian Obsession with the Preservation of Hair” (new poems, Part II); Kumin’s personal “takes” on prominent historical figures; and her tributes to and expressions of affinity with many writers in the past and with such literary contemporaries as Marie Howe and the late Stanley Kunitz.

I take great pleasure, also, in Kumin’s sometimes subtle, sometimes robust wit (imagine a poem titled “The Winking Vulva”); her signature, tightly-controlled, always-deft uses of poetic forms, traditional and invented; and the varieties of tone, from supplication to rapture, from defiance to compassion, from anger to playfulness, which offer counterpoint and balance to the more somber poems of witness and provocation. I love Kumin’s many playful “borrowings” and adaptations of well-known lines from such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins: The world is awash in unwanted dogs (“Want”).

Noting this and a number of other adaptations, I’m tempted to imagine a possible nod to Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating,” as well, in her sonnet, “Cross-Country Skiing,” with its same first words “I love,” and its circular return to the image and words with which it begins, but this might be a far stretch.

“Artistic growth,” wrote Willa Cather, in The Song of the Lark, “is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.” By locating her new poems at the front of the book, ahead of those of the previous 20 years, Kumin gives us a chance to see where they have come from: to observe not only the consistencies in her work, but subtle changes, as well. Two of these changes seem not so much in truthfulness but in the frequency of poems of witness, and in the shifting of tone and approach -- from earlier, quieter, poems, to poems that openly and directly rage against tyranny, injustice, and war (Still to Mow). Taking the side of those who suffer atrocities and indignities at the hands of others, no matter who they are, Kumin takes on such topics as the torture and abuse, by American troops, of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghriab prison (“Please Pay Attention as the Ethics Have Changed”) and the beating of Iraqi children by Iraqi policemen (“Extraordinary Rendition”). In “What You Do” she asks, are you still Christian/ when you kill by crucifixion/ when you ice the body. “The Beheadings” offers grim, new perspectives on this universal, age-old method of execution, including the executions of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and U.S. engineer Paul Johnson, caught alive on a grainy video.

One can also see changes in the frequency of Kumin’s meditations on mortality.

Sometimes her approach is playful: If only death could be/ like going to the movies./ You get up afterward/ and go out/ saying, how was it? / Tell me, tell me how was it (“Summer Meditation”). Other times, the tone is somber, as in her evocation of an elderly couple’s 36