And Short the Season: Poems
Poet, children’s author, fiction writer, and holder of the Pulitzer Prize, Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal, Kumin, approaching 90, is writing at her clarion best in her newest collection following Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, 1990–2010 (2010). Perennially inspired by her love for horses and her New Hampshire farm, where she has long tended to a “Jewish atheistic all-organic / vegetable garden,” Kumin writes with biological precision (“feeding the ancient mycorrhizal paths”), an unflinchingly realistic appreciation for nature’s equilibrium, and keenly informed outrage over humanity’s  planetary mayhem. A seasoned protest poet, Kumin turns to history in her condemnation of “the luxury of not knowing,” writing of Nazis hiding in Paraguay and the abominations at Guantánamo. She offers an unusual perspective on our propensity for schadenfreude, pays tribute to the trailblazing seventeenth-century writer, Margaret Cavendish, and looks back to her own emergence as a poet in male-dominated precincts. Kumin also offers extraordinarily graceful and powerfully stoic elegies and musings on time and death, taking deep breaths and reminding herself and us to follow nature’s imperative, “Begin again.” --Donna Seaman