Up Country

Up Country: Poems of New England, New and Selected gathers Maxine Kumin's poems of rural New Hampshire life, farm labor, weather, and the animals she lived among, adding new work to a selection drawn from her earlier books and building, across the whole volume, a sustained picture of one particular landscape returned to again and again rather than visited once for material.

Kumin writes in a plain, formally controlled style that critics have compared to Elizabeth Bishop's precision of observation and to Robert Frost's rural New England focus, though her poems keep closer to actual barn work, planting, and animal husbandry than either comparison quite suggests. She had been grouped early in her career with the confessional poets, Anne Sexton chief among them, a close friend with whom she also collaborated on children's books, but Up Country shows a poet working in a different register from Sexton's, less rhetorical, less focused on personal crisis, and more interested in the dense physical presence of the natural world for its own sake. The poems find quiet philosophical weight in ordinary rural tasks, treating the discipline of caring for land and animals as a way of thinking about transience and permanence together, rather than a mere backdrop to a separate argument.

Reading the book means moving through short, exact poems grounded in real agricultural labor, poems that trust concrete detail to carry their meaning without excess commentary. It suits a reader who wants nature poetry with genuine working knowledge behind it, written by someone who kept the animals herself rather than observing them from a distance.