Nurture (Poets, Penguin) - Softcover

Kumin, Maxine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140586199 ISBN 13: 9780140586190

Publisher: Puffin, 1989

Synopsis

Poems deal with animals, compassion, ecology, the seasons, travel, art, and memory

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

In her ninth volume of poetry, Kumin warns of impending eco-catastrophe and summons up nurturing, conservationist instincts that might yet save us. She observes the rituals of Antarctic birds, warns reindeer against eating radioactive wastes and pens heartbreaking lyrics on the endangered manatee, trumpeter swan, white fox. Occasional and autobiographical poems in this collection carry over the theme of our disrupted relationship with nature. Kumin pays homage to vegetarian George Bernard Shaw and to Georgia O'Keeffe. Alert, conversational, ever-questioning, she muses on a Cape Canaveral shuttle launch, middle age, the possibility of an afterlife, the technology that may destroy us. In travelogue-poems she searches for her roots in Salzburg, Austria, "for some thin line of comfort that binds us." One long, notably candid piece, "Marianne, My Mother, and Me," traces changes in America's mindset over seven decades through the intertwined destinies of poet Marianne Moore and Kumin's mother.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Roughly a third of the poems in Kumin's ninth collection focus on an urgent, uncomfortable theme: humankind's blind destruction of wildlife in the name of economic well-being. Acknowledging that nature is "a catchment of sorrows," she nevertheless notes the poisoned caribou, the manatee "sidewiped by boat propellers." The imagery is often vivid and the concern indisputably real, but Kumin's language cannot approach the visual eloquence of the animals themselves, a task only Marianne Moore could consistently accomplish. Ironically, Moore is the guiding light of Nurture 's most engaging poem, "Marianne, My Mother, and Me," an autobiographical narrative that spans 50 years of the poet's life and deftly conflates private with public history. The direct expression of sentiment--not the sentimental--remains Kumin's hallmark, now more strongly than ever.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Puffin
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140586199
• ISBN 13: 9780140586190
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80