Böcker av Maxine Kumin

A lonely wizard moves to a new town in this charming children's story by renowned American poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, now in print again for the first time in decades.Everything is going wrong in the town of Drocknock until the new wizard arrives. He is very young, and he is lonely, and very nervous too; but he knows just where to find the right spells to stop the chicken pox epidemic and bring back the twenty cows that had disappeared. The drought is the town's most important problem, however. The new wizard needs five of his own tears to bring rain, but he is so happy in Drocknock he cannnot cry! "Peel an onion," the old wizard advises. "But," he warns, "beware, beware...a wizard's tears are powerful. They can make strange magic."..... The Wizard's Tears, first published in 1975, is moving and kind and funny in its intimate and modest way, yet strong and full of renewed life with stunning new illustrations from Keren Katz. Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin had been friends for several years--having met at and carpooled to a Boston poetry workshop--when they began writing books together for younger readers. The creativity and versatility required for children's books offered the two poets the opportunity to experiment and play with language in new, unexpected ways, to connect world and words with humble, powerful, childlike imagery--"not unlike writing a poem where compression acts to intensify feelings," as Maxine reckoned.

In July 1998, when Maxine Kumin's horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic, she was not expected to live. Yet, less than a year later, her progress pronounced a miracle by her doctors, she was at work on this journal of her astonishing recovery. She tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during weeks of intensive care and rehabilitation, of the lasting "rehab" friendships, and of the loving family who always believed she would heal. "[S]he resonates wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul."-Anne Roiphe, New York Times Book Review "Maxine Kumin brings the sensitivity and imagination of a poet to her extraordinary ordeal."-Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery "From a singular experience she has created a lesson that is universal, which, it seems to me, is the essence of being a poet."-Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner

From a marketplace in Bangkok to the fields of New Hampshire, from recollections of her own childhood to celebrations of an infant grandson, Kumin stakes her far-flung claims with authority in her tenth book of poetry.

"Kumin's is a poetry of wide sympathy and tact in which the ecumenical flavor is dominant. . . . This collection is full of generational severance and renewal, and a tart and compassionate irony."-The New Yorker

"Measured but warm, this work draws you in; it is another success among her many titles."--Library Journal

"The power that Kumin draws from and brings to literature is potent and seemingly inexhaustible."-Booklist

Gathered from nine collections representing three decades of work, these poems-newly available here in a rich and varied volume-celebrate the growth of a major artist.

This luminous collection is Maxine Kumin's twelfth volume of poetry, the first since her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo.