In the Park

Published in 1989 in her collection Nurture, a collection of socially aware poems that diverged from themes and modes in Maxine Kumin’s previously published collections, “In the Park” is a poem written in simple language that questions complex themes and topics surrounding existence. Kumin, who favors honesty and directness in her poetry (she was a friend and contemporary of Confessional poet Anne Sexton), does not shy away from those attributes in “In the Park,” which leaves the reader pondering their own inevitable demise and possible return to life.

Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet whose poetry career spanned six decades, was inspired by the natural New England landscape of her New Hampshire farm, where she lived most of her life. Her poems, which have been called spare and precise, explore themes of death, natural cycles, loss, and the human relationship to nature. “In the Park” draws on many of these themes. Written about the moment between death and rebirth and exploring what happens following one’s death, “In the Park” also explores elements of nature and religion to reason or understand the mystery of death. As a poet with a “far-ranging eye and technical skill” (“Maxine Kumin.” The Poetry Foundation.), Kumin has engaged topics ranging from the everyday occurrences on the farm to religious persecution and famine.

Poet Biography

Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a neighborhood of Philadelphia, in 1925. Born into a Reform Jewish family, Kumin grew up attending Catholic and public schools. For college, Kumin attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge Massachusetts, where she earned a BA and MA in literature. Kumin was married young, while she was still in college, to Victor Kumin in 1946. The two would go on to have three children, two daughters and a son, which they raised in rural New Hampshire in an old farmhouse.

While a mother and wife in the 1950s, Kumin began attending workshops in Boston, befriended Anne Sexton, and started writing poems. As a lecturer, she regularly traveled to universities around the country. The author of numerous collections of poetry, including Up Country: Poems of New England (1972), which received the Pulitzer Prize, Kumin is also a prolific author, having written a memoir, four novels, countless essays, and more than 20 books for children.

Kumin’s poetry has been lauded and received with praise and grace. Many critics liken her to canonical pastoral poets such as Robert Frost owing to her deep appreciation and love for her New England home, which she frequently wrote about in her poems. Others have compared her simple, attentive style to Elizabeth Bishop, who gravitated to extreme observation and detail. However, while Kumin might share connections with a number of poets, her poems stand on their own, in their own class. As one critic put it:

[W]hat is remarkable … is the extent to which poets like Maxine Kumin can survive and outdistance both their peers and themselves by increasingly trusting those elements of their work which are most strongly individual (“Maxine Kumin.” The Poetry Foundation.).

Kumin, who did not begin to write and publish poems until the middle of her life, is known for her maturity of voice and subject matter. Often writing on themes of nature, identity, and larger concepts regarding life and loss, Kumin published her first collection, Halfway, in 1961 at the age of 36. Following this collection, Kumin’s work received countless praise and accolades throughout her lifetime, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. From 1981-1982 she was the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress.

A lecturer and educator, Kumin has taught poetry workshops and given lectures at several prestigious universities around the country, including MIT and Columbia University. Yet she was always tied to her rural farmhouse in New Hampshire, where she kept a stable of horses and tended a garden. This landscape is known for being Kumin’s constant inspiration for new poems. Kumin continued to write and publish poems up until her death in 2014, with her final collection, And Short the Season, being published posthumously. Spanning six decades, Kumin’s poetic career was extensive, and her substantial oeuvre added keen insight into what it means to exist in this world.

Poem Text

Kumin, Maxine. “In the Park.” 1989. Poets.org.

Summary

Kumin’s “In the Park” explores death, rebirth, and what it means to confront one’s own mortality. The poem opens with a statement describing the length—“forty-nine days” (Line 1)—between death and reincarnation in the Buddhist faith. In the following lines, Kumin’s speaker illustrates what could be done in this time, describing a soul swimming “the English Channel” (Line 4) or climbing “every step of the Washington Monument” (Line 6). At the end of the first stanza, the speaker highlights the mysterious aspect of unknowing that occurs following one’s death.

Stanza 2 explores a story about Roscoe Black, who nearly died during a grizzly bear attack. This stanza illustrates the moment between life and death that Black experienced. The speaker introduces “the Old Testament” (Line 17) in the third stanza, continuing to grapple with the themes of death and dying by leaning on religion. They conclude the stanza by saying in the Old Testament “Hell” (Line 25) doesn’t exactly exist. This reiterates the mystery of what comes next.

The final stanza returns to the concept of reincarnation introduced in the first stanza. The speaker uses the image of the grizzly bear to describe death and the symbol of Glacier Park to describe the time between one life dying and the next life’s birth. In the poem’s final line, Kumin’s speaker reminds the reader that death happens to all.