The Long Marriage: Poems [Paperback]

Maxine Kumin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2003

This luminous collection is Maxine Kumin's twelfth volume of poetry, the first since her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo. Themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery appear here, along with poems addressing the eminent dead: Wordsworth, Gorki, Rukeyser, and others. "Inescapably, many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to," Kumin says.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Distinguished poet Kumin (Connecting the Dots, etc.), who has found inspiration in her rural life on a New Hampshire horse farm, garnered critical praise and respectable sales last year with her prose memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery, an account of grievous injuries she sustained after a fall from a horse. This new collection, her first after a well-received Selected Poems: 1960-1990 (1997), contains poems that pertain to this experience, with observant details about physical therapy classes that would have daunted a writer of less steely strength. Always buoyantly optimistic in previous books, the poet is put to the test here by potentially gloomy subject matter, as in the poem "Grand Canyon": "Outings for wheelchair postulants/ are regular affairs here on the brink/ of this improbably upheaved landscape/... The fact is, no conjecture can resolve/ why I survived this broken neck/ known in the trade as the hangman's fracture,/ this punctured lung, eleven broken ribs,/ a bruised liver, and more...." Kumin is able to find humor in her situation, and carefully keeps an ear to her fellow patients' speech patterns. In "Grady, Who Lost a Leg in Korea, Addresses Me in the Rehab Gym," she records plausible speech: "Now those guys over there/ in chairs? They got the sugar/ Diabetes. Works like a cannibal,/ one leg, then the other." There are also poems in homage to Muriel Rukeyser and to birds. The book is uneven and overlong, but Kumin's avid readership will find irresistible this evidence of her overcoming severe physical injury.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

In her recent prose memoir, Inside the Halo (Norton, 2000), Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Kumin wrote of her torturously slow recovery from an equestrian accident, which left her with a broken neck and other serious injuries. This is the first book of poems to emerge after that accident in July 1998, and its contents display an even more developed richness of spirit than do previous works. Although several of the poems treat Kumin's 50-plus year marriage, one feels that the book's title may refer to "marriage" as a kind of covenant between the poet and her environment. Kumin lives in rural New England, and the farming atmosphere is never far from her heart ("a black melt has seized the squash vines"). Divided into seven sections, this collection also includes poems about sociopolitical situations (capital punishment, extinct wildlife, revolutions), considerations of aging and rehabilitation, and tributes to Hopkins, Wordsworth, Rukeyser, and Rilke. Kumin concludes with two poems on the agony and confused emotions of surviving a friend's suicide (her mentor and close colleague, poet Anne Sexton, committed suicide in 1974): "We are trapped in the plot, every one./ Left behind, there is no oblivion." Highly recommended. Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 118 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393324370
• ISBN-13: 978-0393324372
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,138,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Maximizing Your Cumin, July 31, 2009

By 

Exordia N. (Iowa City, Iowa USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Long Marriage: Poems (Paperback)

Misfortunes never neglect us even in our old age. They come again and again to haunt and injury our body and our spirit. Kumin's collection reflects on these experiences, some are misfortunes, that come to her, and to us, to bruise our lips, our hearts, our memories of friendships, our relationship to the natural world, and our souls. Hollie likes her so I thought I would give the poet a thorough try. Besides, Kumin breeds Arabian and quarter horses. And reading Kumin inspires me to concoct mediterranean cuisines, pita with hummus and Yukon potatoes sauteed with cumin. A good anthology to begin to sample the spirit of a delectable Philadelphia native:

"When Mother was little, all/ that she knew about flying was what/ her bearded grandfather told her:/ every night your soul flies/ out of your body and into/ God's lap. He keeps it under his handkerchief until morning."