In the Park

Kumin’s work, while varied and difficult to place within one poetic tradition, most commonly follows the work of Robert Frost with its overly observant eye and attention to nature, particularly the rural New England landscape where she lived most of her life. Poets like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, and Robert Frost have used nature throughout their poetry to highlight deeper concepts and philosophical beliefs surrounding life, attaching to nature’s changing seasons and the life cycles of the plants, animals, and planet Earth. While a broad, complicated concept, nature is a driving force in Kumin’s work. Kumin, who was a horse woman who lived most of her life in rural New Hampshire on a farm, was aware of nature first-hand. Much like Frost, who also lived and wrote in and about rural New England, Kumin’s poems do not praise nature, seeking lyrical transcendence; instead, her poems are that of stoic observation, in which she draws conclusions, based on nature and about life.

“In the Park” is from Kumin’s 1989 collection Nurture, a collection that was criticized in The New York Times Book Review by Carol Muske for containing poems that are “exhaustive in their sorrow; they are predominantly short, brutal elegies for the natural world” (“