SOURCE: Cotter, James Finn. “Poetry Travels.” Hudson Review 42, no. 3 (autumn 1989): 520-21.

In the following excerpt, Cotter argues that survival is the primary theme of the poems in Nurture.

Maxine Kumin in Nurture, her eighth collection of poetry, describes a return to ancestral Austria in “On Reading an Old Baedeker in Schloss Leopoldskron” and “The Festung, Salzburg.” She wonders if she will meet some distant and unrecognized relative there, a survivor of the Anschluss. Survivors populate this poet's work. Caribou, seals, turtles, penguins and other animals struggle to survive. “I am thankful for what's left that's wild,” Kumin reflects in “Distance,” and lists coydogs, hoot owls, moose, and bears. As she mows with her Tuff-Cut power motor on her birthday, she echoes Hopkins' line: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” In “Homage to Binsey Populars,” she directly alludes to Hopkins' pain at trees being cut down. If...