Pulitzer Prize Poetry Winner
Up Country
by Maxine Kumin
Summary
These pastoral poems chronicle the rhythms of life on a New Hampshire farm, attending to seasonal labor, animals, and the porous boundary between human and wild. Kumin works in plainspoken, formally controlled lines that draw quiet philosophical weight from concrete rural detail. The collection extends a New England tradition of nature writing while insisting on the moral seriousness of the everyday.
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Historical Context & Significance
Kumin was a close friend of Anne Sexton; her win was a tribute to grounded, traditional nature poetry.