SOURCE: George, Diana Hume. “Creature Comforts.” Women's Review of Books 9, no. 8 (May 1992): 17.

In the following review, George explores the major themes of Looking for Luck, situating them in the context of Kumin's career.

With Looking for Luck, her tenth volume of poetry, Maxine Kumin joins the Norton stable of writers. I'm usually uncomfortable with that term, but for Kumin, the horsewoman-poet of American letters, it's appropriate. For decades she has written about the connections between humanity and the rest of the folk who inhabit the world. In Looking for Luck she continues this and other themes—death and loss, family and legacy, how to survive devastation and celebrate life.

The poems here are often about the intervention of imagination in the natural world. The opening, “Credo,” announces Kumin's belief in magic—in the “rights of animals to leap out of our skins,” as in an Indian legend in...