SOURCE: "Down from the Forked Hill Unsullied," in Poetry, Vol. CVIII, No. 2, May, 1966, pp. 121-24.

Wallace is an American educator and poet. In the following excerpt, he lauds The Privilege for its direct language.

Maxine Kumin's new poems [in The Privilege] are superb. She hardly makes a mistake. Her language always catches the world into the poem, is deliciously prosy, direct, surprising—"fog thick as terry cloth"—as are her strategies, which permit beginning a poem:

 The symbol inside this poem is my father's feet
which, after fifty years of standing behind
the counter waiting on trade,
were tender and smooth and lay on the ironed sheet,
a study of white on white, like a dandy's shirt. 

Childhood and now, the halves of her world mirror equally a vision of the isolation and enchantment of selfhood: in the remembered games, streets, convent school, legless man "who came / inside...