Jack and Other New Poems

"Maxine Kumin's fifteenth collection contains many new examples of her signature pastoral poems: in the comic "Seven Caveats in May," her dog puts a bear up a tree. "Fox on His Back" paints winter's "long nights shy of melt," with perhaps the same "brown and pregnant bear / leafwrapped like an old cigar." But she also explores darker themes: the onset of war, threats to our civil liberties and to the environment, the bitter feuding of brothers, Ulysses S. Grant's little-known Jew Order. Loved animals die or disappear, and poems that question "where any of us is going" reveal a heightened awareness of her own mortality in this, her eightieth year. With death the central theme, poems of the body and praise songs for beloved animals explore how memory consoles and haunts."--Jacket.