One is impressed by several qualities in [the poems collected in Maxine Kumin's The Nightmare Factory]: depth and range, delicately controlled yet forceful emotion, and the unobtrusive presence of formal devices. Miss Kumin never settles for superficial treatment of her material although she deals with an extensive range of subjects. From her "pastoral" poems, which move beyond the idyllic to realistic cycles of birth and decay, through her "tribal" poems, in which she manages to focus on various of her familial situations without making the reader uncomfortable by the willing surrender of privacy, to her poems involving the pains dealt to body and psyche by the experiences of love, loss, sickness, uncertainty, she is always ready with the image, the insight, the detail that takes the reader into a deeper realization of the poem.

A review of "The Nightmare Factory," in The Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1971, by The...