Up Country: Poems of New England, New and Selected

by Maxine Kumin

Book

Genres: Poetry

83 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Maxine Kumin's 17th poetry collection, published in the spring of 2010, is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. Her awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. A former US poet laureate, she and her husband lived on a farm in New Hampshire. Maxine Kumin died in 2014.

Reviews

[Ludmila · Rating 4 out of 5]

It really grew on me. She is semi-formal. I didn’t care for some stylistic choices. My favorite poems were Beans, In These Signs, and Watering Trough. It talked a lot about death, which was sad. I guess people like to talk about it to feel important.

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

First read, two stars, second read three, now a four. That might be my definition of good poetry: what looks simple at first glance needs more time.


Beans

Having planted
that seven mile plot
He came to love it
More than he had wanted.
His own sweat
Sweetened it.
Standing pat
On his shadow
Hoeing every noon
it came to pass
In a summer long gone
That Thoreau
Made the earth say beans
Instead of grass.

You, my gardener
Setting foot
Among the weeds
That stubbornly reroot
Have raised me up
Into hellos
Expansive as
Those everbearing rows.

Even without
the keepsake strings
to hold the shoots
of growing things
I know this much:
I say beans
at your touch.

[Ryan]

Anne Sexton titled this book for Maxine Kumin. Therefore, I am obligated to read it.

[Cheryl · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is indecent of this bird to sing at night
and leave no shadow. I flap up out of sleep
from some uncertain place dragging my baggage:
a torn pillow, a tee shirt and a braided whip.
O Will, Billy, William wherever you are and under
whatever name this doleful bird must tell me
one hundred and forty-six times the same story.
It is full of fear. Such shabbiness in those three clear tones!
Pinched lips, missed chances, runaways, loves you
treated badly, a room full of discards,
I among them.

I am tired of this history of loss!
What drum can I beat to reach you?
To be reasonable
is to put out the light.
To be reasonable is to let go.
The eye of the moon is as bland as new butter.
There is no other light to wink at or salute.
Now let the loudest sound I send you be the
fuzzheads of ripe butternuts dropping tonight
in Joppa like the yellow oval tears of some rare
dinosaur, dropping to build up the late September ground.

I did not feel one shred of New England in these poems. They also seemed to be the anti-Mary Oliver type of poems that instead of celebrating nature, dourly complains of it. I am sure they appeal to someone.

[Rob Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did my best to relate...