17 pages • 34 minutes read
Maxine KuminIn the Park
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Kumin’s work, while varied and difficult to place within one poetic tradition, most commonly follows the work of Robert Frost with its overly observant eye and attention to nature, particularly the rural New England landscape where she lived most of her life. Poets like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, and Robert Frost have used nature throughout their poetry to highlight deeper concepts and philosophical beliefs surrounding life, attaching to nature’s changing seasons and the life cycles of the plants, animals, and planet Earth. While a broad, complicated concept, nature is a driving force in Kumin’s work. Kumin, who was a horse woman who lived most of her life in rural New Hampshire on a farm, was aware of nature first-hand. Much like Frost, who also lived and wrote in and about rural New England, Kumin’s poems do not praise nature, seeking lyrical transcendence; instead, her poems are that of stoic observation, in which she draws conclusions, based on nature and about life.
“In the Park” is from Kumin’s 1989 collection Nurture, a collection that was criticized in The New York Times Book Review by Carol Muske for containing poems that are “exhaustive in their sorrow; they are predominantly short, brutal elegies for the natural world” (“Maxine Kumin.” The Poetry Foundation). With its themes of life, death, and rebirth, and its use of Roscoe Black’s near-death encounter with a grizzly bear in Montana, “In the Park” uses nature to illustrate the power of earth and how powerless humans are. The passing of time, death, and the life cycles that all living organisms must live by is ever present in “In the Park,” a poem that echoes one’s powerlessness when it comes to death (“you won’t know till you get there which to do” [Line 8] and “no choosing what to come back as” [Line 27]). Kumin uses nature—namely the grizzly bear—to represent the wildness of existence and how in a moment that existence can be put into jeopardy, as it was for Roscoe Black.
Historical Context
“In the Park” cites the true story of Roscoe Black, a woodsman and hiker who owned St. Mary’s Lodge in Glacier National Park, Montana. Black, who became a legend out West, was on a 27-mile hike with two others when a grizzly bear attacked. As Kumin’s poem indicates, Black was beneath the bear, eye to eye with it. As one account describes, “he was helpless under the long, sharp claws and knife-like teeth” (Gelb, Barbara. “Please Don’t Feed the Grizzlies.” The New York Times. 15 May 1983). Black never believed he would die; he simply thought he would be mauled by the animal. So, he silently, quietly laid beneath the bear until it decided to leave. Occurring in the 1970s or 1980s, this bear attack quickly became legendary, for Black survived what should have been certain death.
Kumin’s use of Black’s story in “In the Park” clearly represents the overarching truth the poem seeks to tell surrounding death. To be almost certainly dead, yet still conscious, is to travel those 49 days between death and life in an instant. In Black’s own words: “He laid on me not doing anything. I could feel his heart beating against my heart” (Lines 12-13).
Nurture, the collection that “In the Park” is contained in, is a unique collection for Kumin. Kumin explores themes surrounding the natural world and the human relationship to it. Published and written in the 1980s, when the environmental movement was gaining traction—the hole in the ozone layer caused by CFCs had been discovered and the public was beginning to advocate for and demand a safe and healthy environment—the poems that make up Nurture cast a “cynical eye on humankind, the ‘unaware’ species responsible for the destruction of the living world” (Muske, Carol. “Go Be a King in a Field of Weeds.” The New York Times. 5 Nov. 1989). “In the Park,” through its reference to Buddhist philosophy, in which every living thing is reincarnated in the form of new life, argues that one doesn’t know what one will return as. Because of this, all life should be respected, loved, valued, and cared for. As Black respected the grizzly bear who laid on top of him, humans need to respect the natural world, which chooses when and how one dies.
