Maxine Kumin, the former poet laureate who died February 6, was the last of a great generation of woman poets that included Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Her 17th collection, And Short the Season, is her last.
The poems are filled with joy, sorrow, anger, mortality, politics and horses--lots of references to her cherished horses. When she was 73, she fell off one and broke her neck; though she recovered, pain was with her the rest of her life (as one poem here explores). Some poems deal with other artists, like her imagined version of a visit by Walt Whitman to a dear friend in Dublin just before he died. Others are about Hardy, Ginsberg, Van Gogh, even Michael Jackson.
There are harsh political poems about rendition and torture, as well as pieces about global warming, like "Just Deserts" ("For however long it takes it will serve us right"). Others touch on her own poetry and writing,
"slumped at my desk
over unborn poems
...mostly deleting, deleting, deleting
in an ecstasy of failure."
The longest poem, the stubbornly feminist "Sonnets Uncorseted," confronts the "almost all-male enclave of poetry" in the 1950s, while the last poem, "Allow Me," offers a prescient vision of her death at her beloved New Hampshire farm:
"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."
--Tom Lavoie, former publisher