Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief

by Maxine Kumin

Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief by Maxine Kumin.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Maxine Kumin's 17th poetry collection, published in the spring of 2010, is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. Her awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. A former US poet laureate, she and her husband lived on a farm in New Hampshire. Maxine Kumin died in 2014.

Reviews

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of her books. A mixed “bag”, I’d read two books included in this new and selected collection and gave them more stars than I give the whole of this book. I do, still, include her as one of my favorite poets.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another Library discard I couldn't resist for a quarter. A paperback, originally, for some reason the Library had it rebound in buckram (I always want to say "stout buckram"), although it appears to have never circulated. It was published in 1982, perhaps the first of Kumin's several collecteds & selecteds. 1982, the year I graduated high school, on the brink of becoming dimly aware of American literature... The Raymond Carver short story era, the last gasp of American poetry before the University tranquilized, caged and fed it. Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979. James Wright died in 1983. Poetry became a career. This book, for all its failures at least doesn't have the stench of a Curriculum Vitae about it.

Kumin was a big deal at one time. Her book (third, I believe) Up Country came out in 1973 and won the Pulitzer Prize and did something few postwar books of poetry do - it sold. She also gained some fame - which she never exploited - as a friend of Anne Sexton, who she'd met in a workshop in Boston. The friendship must have been difficult for Kumin, but she stuck by Sexton to the end (and let me say here, Kumin seems to have been a fine human being - something which manifests itself in her poems).

Nowadays Kumin's still "famous," in that postwar American poet way - the Poetry Foundation goes on at length and when she died, and professional poetaster Philip Schultz praised her in The New Yorker, etc. Her Wikipedia article has that truncated, cover-the-basics treatment many contemporary poets get, although Up Country does not have its own articles, which seems amiss - poetry books (other than Rod McKuen's) so rarely sell that it deserves at least a stub. As with so many contemporary poets, her actual achievement is a blur, a long list of prizes and academic positions, but it is tough to find any actual individual poems on which her accomplishments are based. She published seventeen books of poetry - considering her first book didn't come out 'til she was 36, a very prodigious number. This sort of output - considered a virtue in reviews and obituaries, is a blight on American postwar poetry - so many books, so many mediocre poems. Kumin, like so many of her contemporaries, is buried beneath her own work.

***

Maxine Kumin's poems are many things: warm, compassionate, sensitive, observant and deeply humane. Maxine Kumin poems are also predictable, self-assured (even when pretending not to be) and (mostly) boring. I understand completely why people like these kind of poems - they affirm what it means to be human, with a broad emotional range and gobs of sympathy. What's not to like? Or, more importantly, what's not to wholeheartedly approve of?

The problem for me is that such poems tend to know too much.

Here is one at random:

July, Against Hunger

All week the rain holds off. We sweat
stuffing the barn full, like a pillow,
as much as it will hold of these
strangely dead, yellow cubes we set
in unchinked rows, so air can move between.
The smell collects, elusive, sweet,
of gray nights flecked with the snake tongue
of heat lightning, when the grownups sat
late on the side porch talking politics,
foreclosures, war, and Roosevelt.

Loneliness fills me like a pitcher.
The old deaths dribble out. My father clucks
his tongue, disapproving of manual labor.
I swivel to catch his eye, he ducks
behind the tractor, his gay fedora
melts into this year's colt munching grain.
Meanwhile, a new life kicks in the mare.
Meanwhile, the poised sky opens on rain.
The time on either side of now stands fast
glinting like jagged window glass.

There are limits, my God, to what I can heft
in this heat! Clearly, the Great Rat waits,
who comes all winter to gnaw on iron
or wood, and tears the last flesh from the bone. (p. 78)

This is, to be sure, a very agreeable sort of poem, and there are a lot of them like this in her oeuvre. Kumin is perhaps the pioneer of this mode of writing. Plain voice, at home in nature - but (somewhat daintily) aware of nature's peril and indifference. The problem here, as in so many of these poems, is the way the air leaks out of them. Barns stuffed with hay (or straw?) are not like pillows, not in the least (pillows are supposed to bulge, again and again, barns don't). Hay is not "strangely" dead, its just dead. Do snake tongues "fleck" or "flick"? Flick, I think (debatable, I know). "Loneliness fills me like a pitcher." is so galumphingly abject that it strikes me as funny. The following deaths dribbling out seems to have something to do with being filled by the pitcher but heck if I know how. I do like the fedora ducking behind the tractor - a demonstration of Kumin's abilities, when she isn't just cranking out the metaphors and off-the-shelf nature descriptions. I detest "the poised sky opens on rain" but entire careers have been made on writing like this - imagine all those heads nodding, the murmurs of approval at the poetry readings! "Glinting like jagged window glass" is another bit of inertia. The Great Rat has promise, but that last stanza just seems tacked on to me. What flesh? Whose bone? I wonder. Bones are always significant in such a poem (the "stones and bones" of the Deep Image poets - Kumin was no doubt infected with their archetypes, most poets of that era were - it ruined W. S. Merwin). Rats despoil the fodder, I believe. Great Rats, well, you just have to take it on faith.

Here's another one at random:

The Mummies

Two nights running I was out there
in orange moonlight with old bedsheets
and a stack of summered-over Sunday papers
tucking up the tomatoes while the peppers
whimpered and went under and the radishes
dug in with their dewclaws and all over
the field the goldenrod blackened
and fell down like Napoleon's army.

This morning they're still at it, my tomatoes
making marbles, making more of those little
green volunteers that you can rattle
all winter in a coat pocket, like fingers.
But today on the lip of the solstice
I will pull them, one hundred
big blind greenies. I will stand them
in white rows in the root cellar
wrapped one by one
in the terrible headlines.

First of all, I do not entirely understand what is going on here horticulturally. This is my fault, for sure, for I am no gardener. And yet my mom raised tomatoes when I was growing up (out in the quasi-country beyond the suburbs) so I am not completely ignorant of their ways. I am guessing that the tomato plants are still producing late in the year and that the larger unripe tomatoes are being wrapped in newspapers (mummified) in order to store, or ripen them? Assuming this is so, I have no problem about this being a "situation for poetry" - anything will do. But what is reasonably the conceit - mummies - gets dispersed by what to me are random acts of metaphor-mongering - radishes with dewclaws almost works, except cats have dewclaws and cats don't "dig in" (hibernation being the obvious slant here, I think it fair to expect). Napoleon's army is fine, and I like how it worked with the "volunteers" and the "terrible headlines" in the next stanza, but we are still left with mummies and dewclaws. It's a nice poem in a lot of ways, but slightly off-kilter or out-of-focus, slightly...slight.

And yet Kumin has moments. Here is one:

The Grace of Geldings in Ripe Pastures

Glutted, half asleep, browsing in
timothy grown so tall I see them
as through a pale-green stage scrim

they circle, nose to rump,
a trio of trained elephants.
It begins to rain, as promised.

Bit by bit they soak up drops
like laundry dampened to be ironed.
Runnels bedeck them. Their sides

drip like he ribs of very broad
umbrellas. And still they graze
and grazing, one by one let down

their immense, indolent penises
to drench the everlasting grass
with the rich nitrogen

that repeats them. (p. 85)

Okay, I admit those penises surprised me - and I mean surprised in the way one should be surprised in a real poem, but I was also surprised that Kumin pulled it off. Without the penises, this poem is just another Mary Oliver dab of precious nature observation with a few of Kumin's homey touches (laundry and umbrellas). But "their immense, indolent penises" is pretty brilliant, if perhaps undercut by the mini-science lesson of the "rich nitrogen." Kumin doesn't seem to know how to stop (or where to begin).

As with most of the "collecteds" I review, I didn't read the whole book. I feel guilty about this, but I cracked open the book to page 143 and found this, noted as being "from THE HERMIT POEMS":

The Hermit Wakes to Bird Sounds

He startles awake. His eyes are full of white light.
In a minute the sun will ooze into the sky.
Meanwhile, all the machines of morning start up...

to attend to the flinty clanks of the disparate parts
and as the old bleached sun slips into position
slowly the teasing inept malfunctioning
one-of-a-kind machines fall silent

That was the first and last stanza. I disagree with the sun's characterization - "ooze" and "slips into position" are contradictory. This sort of carelessness, this automatic versifying, flyspot the book. These poems cry out for a workshop, where they could at least be tidied up. Then you'd have a collection of tidy poems. Bleh. "Teasing inept malfunctioning." I couldn't have said it better. I just don't want to read any more ; there's not enough payoff, not enough "immense, indolent penises" to make me want to spend more time on it.

***

But still, I do understand why Kumin has her fans. This is the kind of poetry that gets a warm reception; it is basically what The Georgians of post-World War I Britain were doing - affirmation, at-oneness-with-nature, decency, a humane voice against the bang and blab of our era. I can understand how one could draw consolation from this kind of verse, and I have no problem with this. Mary Oliver and Billy Collins are Kumin's heirs. But with such verse we are in the realm of entertainment, of quasi-literary distractions, not art. This is verse, not poetry. But for me this book isn't, as Kafka put it, "the axe for the frozen sea within us." Emily Dickinson, yup. Maxine Kumin, nope.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

She may be the best English-language poet living. What more is there to say?

[Mardi Link · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book of poetry, bar none. It is the book I turn to again and again, at various stages of my life, and it always satisfies.

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this poetry collection. It begins with new poetry and then proceeds with selected poetry from each of Kumin's collections published to that point in reverse chronological order. Most collections of already published poetry are arranged in the opposite way; they begin at the beginning. I can see why Kumin structured the collection this way so as to start with the new material, but it makes for a kind of deflating reading experience. The strongest material is first, and then as the collection goes on, the writing becomes progressively weaker--still good, but weaker.