Kumin, Maxine. The Long Marriage. W.W. Norton and Company, 2002.
Reason read: I read somewhere that January 26th is Marriage Day.
In The Long Marriage Maxine Kumin is keen to describe what she sees in the viewfinder of life. She stares down uncomfortable topics like suicide and crime with unflinching clarity. From the community of Grays Point to gardening to the struggle of rehabilitation after an accident. She even reflects on her own injuries from being thrown from a horse: punctured lung, eleven broken ribs, and a bruised liver…just to name a few. Her poems are life jumping off the page and, dare I say, into your heart.
Poems I enjoyed the most:
- Skinny dipping with William Wordsworth – remembering her days as a Radcliffe student, studying Wordsworth. She paints a picture of a passionate youth and the aftermath of a romance long cooled by time and war.
- Thinking of Gorki While Clearing a Trail – Who is Saturnine Gorki? 1929 International Congress of Atheists.
- Imagining Marianne Moore in the Butterfly Garden – another beautiful tribute.
- Capital Punishment – why are we allowed to see gruesome mutilations (the victims of Sierra Leone) and yet spared the benign execution of Benny Demps?
- Rilke Revisited – another ode to a great writer.
- Why There Will Always Be Thistle – I need to read this to my husband. He can’t stand thistles.
- Pantoum, with Sawn – ode to Helen of Troy
- Calling out of Gray’s Point – charming poem about Purvis, the phone repair man who has been trying to fix the line.
- The Exchange – line I liked the best: “the neophyte animal psychic who visits my barn at midday”…okay.
- Highway Hypothesis – imagining the neighbors.
- Game of Nettles – confessional: while Kumin is remembering a childhood game of playing with nettles, I have a darker reminiscing. I can remember being five or six years and being whipped with nettles by the much older boys. Oh how they laughed.
Author fact: Maxine Kumin was friends with Anne Sexton.
Book trivia: there is a beautiful picture of the author and her husband and their dogs. Kumin’s dedication to Victor, “on the dark lake” is beautiful, too.
Natalie connections: In Miss Merchant’s song, “Sister Tilly” she talks about the kind of woman who reads Rilke poems. Kumin has a poem about Rilke.
Natalie was the first person to introduce me to the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Kumin quotes him in The Long Marriage.
Confessional: Peter Gabriel celebrated the album So by doing an anniversary tour. I could not think of the poet to whom he dedicated “—.” All I could remember was the line, “Anne with her father is out in the boat.” Kumin mentions Anne Sexton by name. Mystery solved…although I could have just looked at the liner notes.
Music: Pee Wee Russell, Jack Teagarden, Erroll Garner, and Glenn Miller.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Prose by Poets” (p 194).
~*LunaSea*~ 