Still to Mow: Poems - Hardcover

Kumin, Maxine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393065499 ISBN 13: 9780393065497

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

"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...."

About this title

About the Author:

Maxine Kumin (1925―2014), a former U.S. poet laureate, was the author of nineteen poetry collections as well as numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. Her awards included the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the Poet’s Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost medals.

From Publishers Weekly:

New England rural life, the daily headlines, old age and a Jewish-American childhood are the four topics around which the latest poems from Kumin (Jack and other New Poems) weave their likable, confident way. The much-revered, prolific New Hampshire writer presents herself as a helpless citizen of a country/ I used to love, tying objections to the war in Iraq to her past as Sixties soccer mom who marched in demonstrations; to her friendship with activists in the 1940s; and to her affection for horses and dogs, whose truth to their own natures make human violence look unnatural indeed. Xochi's Tale speaks truth in the voice of a dog explaining his mixed feelings about the USA. Several villanelles, the highlights of the collection, set their own obedience to the laws of poetic form against some frightening forms of lawlessness: a friend's uncontrollable clinical depression, for example, or the terror inflicted by U.S. troops in Iraq, who invade the houses of civilians, punching kicking yelling... breaking down doors. These poems are formally assured, never obscure and committed at once to social protest and to the facts of a memorable life. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0393065499
• ISBN 13: 9780393065497
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96