In her first poetry collection since a near-fatal accident, Maxine Kumin celebrates the forms that life and writing take

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	The Long Marriage by Maxine Kumin W.W. Norton & Company 72 pages, $21

axine Kumin established herself as a poet by writing in a straightforward, direct style about her active life, which included swimming and horseback riding, raising children and horses, dogs, and sheep. In 1998, however, at the age of seventy-four, her life dramatically changed when she was nearly killed in a horse-driving accident. This past November, following a difficult recovery, Kumin published The Long Marriage, her first book of poetry since the accident. The poems in The Long Marriage draw from Kumin's close relationship with the natural world on her family's farm, her overcoming of her physical injuries, and her feelings about her friend, the poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974. (Kumin was the last to have spent time with her, chatting about poetry over a lunch of tuna-fish sandwiches and vodka, and Sexton's death still haunts Kumin's work; references to it are found in The Long Marriage's "Three Dreams after a Suicide," "The Ancient Lady Poets," and "Oblivion.") The youngest of four children born to a Jewish pawnbroker and his wife, Maxine Kumin studied history and literature at Radcliffe, where, in 1945, she met Victor Kumin, a Harvard graduate on furlough from the Army. The pair married a year later. Poetry was not an important part of Kumin's life until 1957, when she enrolled in a poetry workshop offered by the Boston Center for Adult Education. The workshop's instructor, John Holmes, soon realized there were two major talents in the workshop: Kumin and classmate Anne Sexton, who was, like Kumin, married with children and living in suburban Boston. Kumin and Sexton began commuting to class together and became inseparable. With Sexton's support, along with that of Holmes and other members of the workshop, Kumin began to take her poetry seriously and to garner public acclaim for her work. Her first collection of poems, Halfway, was published in 1961. Since then she has gone on to publish fourteen books of poetry, five novels, five books of essays and memoirs, and twenty children's books, several in collaboration with Anne Sexton. Up Country, a book of her poetry published in 1972, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.