- Contemporary Poetry Review - http://www.cprw.com -  Farther
South Than This  Posted By Jan Schreiber On July 21, 2010 @ 8:04
am In Reviews | No Comments  Jack and Other New Poems by Maxine
Kumin. Norton, 2005.  There is a kind of poem that tastemakers
and status jockeys tend to ignore: one neither difficult
(because highly figurative, allusive, multilayered) nor terse
and formal (with every syllable required to justify itself).
Such seemingly less self-conscious verse shares many qualities
with prose. It is often casual in tone, conversational, even
chatty, full of events and descriptions of human quirks and
quiddities. It resembles a newspaper column rather than the more
academic work of a Richard Wilbur or a Jorie Graham (to take two
ends of a completely different spectrum). Though written in
lines, it does not sound like poetry: there’s often no
discernible meter, and if an occasional rhyme pops up, it’s
there for decoration, not structure, and doesn’t distract you
from the matter at hand. This is the so