Feb 7, 2014 4 min read

Warner, N.H. (AP) – Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose spare, deceptively simple lines explored some of the most complex aspects of human existence – birth and death, evanescence and renewal, and the events large and small conjoining them all – died Thursday at her home in Warner, N.H. She was 88.

Her death was announced by her daughter Judith Kumin, who said her mother had been in declining health for the last year and a half.

The author of essays, novels, short stories and children’s books as well as poetry, Kumin (pronounced KYOO-min, like the spice) was praised by critics for her keen ear for the aural character of verse – the clash and cadence of meter, the ebb and flow of rhyme – and her naturalist’s eye for minute observation.

She was the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, as the U.S. poet laureate was then known, from 1981 to 1982; from 1989 to 1994 she was the poet laureate of New Hampshire, where she and her husband, Victor, had lived full time since the mid-1970s.

Kumin won the Pulitzer in 1973 for “Up Country,” her fourth volume of verse. The book examined life on and around the tumbledown New Hampshire farm the couple had bought in 1963. In “Homecoming,” a poem from the collection here in its entirety, Kumin wrote:

“Having come unto

the tall house of our habit

where it settles rump downward

on its stone foundations

in the manner of a homely brood mare

who throws good colts

and having entered

where sunlight is pasted on the windows

ozone rises from the mullions

dust motes pollinate the hallway

and spiders remembering a golden age

sit one in each drain

we will hang up our clothes and our vegetables

we will decorate the rafters with mushrooms

on our hearth we will burn splits of silver popple

we will stand up to our knees in their flicker

the soup kettle will clang five notes of pleasure

and love will take up quarters.”

Kumin’s nearly 20 volumes of verse include her first, “Halfway” (1961); “The Retrieval System” (1978); “Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief” (1982); “The Long Marriage” (2001); and “Where I Live” (2010).

A last collection by Kumin, “And Short the Season,” is to be published in the spring, as is “Lizzie!,” a partly autobiographical novel for young adults about a girl coping with a spinal-cord injury.

Though nearly all of Kumin’s writing was rooted in personal experience – her relationships with her family, the pleasurable rhythm of farm chores, the deep connection she felt to animals – it was devoid of the lush emotionalism of confessional poets like Anne Sexton, Kumin’s close friend until her suicide in 1974.

The youngest of four children of a Jewish family, Maxine Winokur was born in Philadelphia on June 6, 1925. Her mother, the former Belle Simon, was an amateur pianist; her father, Peter, ran a highly successful pawn brokerage.

She received a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Radcliffe in 1946 and wed Victor Kumin, an engineer, that year. After receiving a master’s in comparative literature from Radcliffe in 1948, she was enveloped by marriage and motherhood in the Boston suburbs.

In the late 1950s Kumin enrolled in a local poetry-writing workshop, where Sexton was also a student. They became such close friends, and such close readers of each other’s work, that each installed a dedicated phone line in her house on which to call the other.

One of Kumin’s most talked-about works of nonfiction was her memoir, “Inside the Halo and Beyond” (2000), a book born of swift, deep adversity.

An accomplished horsewoman, Kumin was training for a carriage-driving show in 1998 when her horse was spooked by a passing truck and she was thrown from the carriage. She suffered serious internal injuries, 11 broken ribs and a broken neck. Kumin spent months encased in a cervical-traction halo.

“Imagine a bird cage big enough for a large squawking parrot,” she wrote. “Imagine a human head inside the cage fastened by four titanium pins that dig into the skull. The pins are as sharp as ice picks.”

She was sustained, she later said, by her family (her daughter Judith typed the spoken words that became the memoir); by her beloved Boston Red Sox; and by the reams of poems she harbored within her. After a grueling rehabilitation, Kumin regained most of her mobility and even rode horses again, though she lived with chronic pain to the end of her life.

Besides her daughter Judith, Kumin’s survivors include her husband; another daughter, Jane Kumin; a son, Daniel; and two grandchildren.