SOURCE: "Earth Mother, Earth Daughter," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. VII, No. 1, October, 1989, pp. 20-1.

Wakoski is an American educator and poet. In the following review of Nurture, Wakoski—while stating that "Kumin's vision is sometimes limited"—admires the poet's Earth poetry, especially "the wonderful images, that turn into big metaphors."

If you had told me fifteen years ago that today I would assess Maxine Kumin as one of the ten best contemporary American poets, I probably would have smiled sceptically. However, my esteem for her work has continued to grow since publication of The Retrieval System (1978), work which seems to ground her right under a reader's bootsoles. In Nurture, she continues to explore American earth mythology as she offers her aging body as the aging earth itself.

Earth poets have fathers as well as mothers, and plainly Kumin's understanding of the world is from William...