Customer Reviews

Still to Mow: Poems

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Taking a peek at the back flap, the cover artist's name is Wolf Kahn, and his smudgy, sleepily rural scene is named "The Reed Place -- Melancholia." The art and the book's title hint at serenity with a touch of ambiguity and, yes, melancholy. What isn't reflected there? Diamond-hard criticism of America's post-9/11 conduct at home and abroad and some other surprises. Best not judge wholly by the winsome but mild cover.

STILL TO MOW tills vivid images of military and political realities into simple country chores as farmers might turn under rotten apples in their orchards. Think of crumbling a clod of turned earth and feeling mashed, slimy fruit between your fingers. Then read "Mulching" and find the gardener (and, by extension, yourself) "prostrate before old suicide bombings, starvation...." Suddenly nasty realities taint the innocence of the soil...and Maxine Kumin has done her poetic job perfectly.

Some of these poems confront gruesome violence of our day head on (no pun intended) and with one passing nod to nature. For example, "The Beheadings" suggests bats' blind flights as a simile for the flight of the soul as the poem renders the terrifying fates of Nicholas Berg, Daniel Pearl, Paul Johnson, and others in the graphic terms most of us intentionally shy from in our own thoughts.

The collection is actually divided into four distinct sections: I. Landscapes, II. Please Pay Attention, III. Turn It And Turn It, and IV. Looking Back. These roughly correspond to poems about the land, the Iraq war, Jewish customs, and the poet's past. Every careful phrase evokes imagery the builds in the mind. Among my favorite selections are "The Domestic Arrangement," about poet William Wordworth's wife; "Still We Take Joy," which expresses hope "the wheel will turn/ once more" from war to peace; and "Looking Back in My Eighty-first Year" -- an honoring of "fated" marriage.

Some of Kumin's poems skewer and hector. Others, such as "Death, Etc." leave a core of emptiness. And still others commemorate poetry and poets. "The Final Poem," for instance, depicts a crusty Robert Frost commanding, " 'Make every poem your final poem.' " STILL TO MOW, by the accentuated power of each entry, obeys.