Poetry Sunday: In the Park
American poet Maxine Kumin died last week . She had an illustrious and much-honored career as a poet and essayist. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Up Country , her fourth volume of verse. She was the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, as the United States 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 lived for many years. In their obituary for the poet, The New York Times described her poetry as " spare, deceptively simple lines (that) 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..." That aspect of her poetry is displayed in her poem "In the Park." In the Park You have forty-nine days between death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist. Even the smallest soul could swim the English Channel in that time or climb, like a ten-month-old child, eve...