Maxine Kumin

Still to Mow

Poems

“The power that Kumin draws from and brings to literature is potent and seemingly inexhaustible.”—Booklist

Here Maxine Kumin’s signature nature poems are shaken up and invigorated by the darker, human realities. She focuses our attention on the pleasures of horse-keeping with poems such as “The Zen of Mucking Out,” then exhorts us to “Please Pay Attention,” decrying Dick Cheney’s “canned hunting / where you don’t stay to pluck / the feathers.” With equanimity, Kumin faces the disappointments and joys of sixty years of marriage—ending with the unspoken question of “Which of us will go down first....”

from “Perspective”

This horse looks out
at any who look in, looks out

prickeared, exaggerated mane and tail
caught in a half-piaffe, hocks over heels.

O horse of my heart, hang on at this still point
as all around us open-air markets explode....

Maxine Kumin is the author of sixteen books of poetry. Among her awards are the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Robert Frost Medal. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire.