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.

Her death was announced by her daughter Judith Kumin, who said that her mother had been in declining health for the last year and a half.

The author of essays, novels, short stories and children’s books as well as poetry, Ms. Kumin (pronounced KYOO-min, like the spice) 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.

She was the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, as the United States poet laureate was then known, from 1981 to 1982; from 1989 to 1994 she was the poet laureate of New Hampshire, where she and her husband, Victor, had lived full time since the mid-1970s.