Research Catalog

Title

Jack and other new poems / Maxine Kumin.

Author

Kumin, Maxine, 1925-2014.

Publication

New York : W.W. Norton & Co., [2005], ©2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

112 pages; 22 cm

Summary

"Maxine Kumin's fifteenth collection contains many new examples of her signature pastoral poems: in the comic "Seven Caveats in May," her dog puts a bear up a tree. "Fox on His Back" paints winter's "long nights shy of melt," with perhaps the same "brown and pregnant bear / leafwrapped like an old cigar." But she also explores darker themes: the onset of war, threats to our civil liberties and to the environment, the bitter feuding of brothers, Ulysses S. Grant's little-known Jew Order. Loved animals die or disappear, and poems that question "where any of us is going" reveal a heightened awareness of her own mortality in this, her eightieth year. With death the central theme, poems of the body and praise songs for beloved animals explore how memory consoles and haunts."--BOOK JACKET.

Contents

The highwaymen -- New Hampshire, February 7, 2003 -- Fox on his back -- Widow and dog -- The brothers -- The Sunday phone call -- The snarl -- Magda of hospice house -- Getting there -- Seven caveats in May -- Summer meditation -- Leech spit -- The apparition -- The survivor -- Broody -- The dog of her life -- Requiem on I-89 -- Women and horses -- Jack -- Which one -- Appropriate tools -- The Jew order -- Inge, in rehab -- Last days -- Historic Blacksburg, Virginia -- The help -- Crossing over -- Where any of us -- The burners, the buriers -- Eating babies -- The rapist speaks : a prison interview -- The agony -- On being asked during a national crisis to write a poem in celebration of the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Key West -- Nostalgia -- Male privilege -- Ode -- The zen of mowing -- For Stanley, some lines at random -- Sonnet in so many words.

ISBN

0393059561 (hardcover)

LCCN

2004021762

OCLC

• ocm56534978
• SCSB-5125364

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries