Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer-winning poet, dies at 88

Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose spare, deceptively simple lines 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 — died on Thursday at her home in Warner, N.H. She was 88.

The author of essays, novels, short stories and children's books as well as more than 20 volumes of poetry, Ms. Kumin was praised by critics for her keen ear for the aural character of verse — the clash and cadence of meter, the ebb and flow of rhyme — and her naturalist's eye for minute observation.