Criticism > Poetry > Kunitz, Stanley (Jasspon) - David Barber (review date 1996)

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David Barber (review date 1996)

SOURCE: "A Visionary Poet at Ninety," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 277, No. 6, pp. 113-16, 118-20.

[In the following excerpt from a review of Passing Through, Barber marvels at Kunitz's "exemplary resilience" and "inexhaustible " curiosity.]

Here, in a trim volume that nobody could wish shorter, [Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected], is virtually the entire windfall of Kunitz's "later" poetry: the selected contents of The Testing-Tree (1971), "The Layers" (the constellation of new poems that led off his 1979 edition of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz), and Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985), along with nine poems appearing for the first time in a book. Not a lifetime's work but something more seasoned and concentrated and surpassing—work with a lifetime steeped in it. In contrast to The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, a more substantial...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Poetry (review date 1930)
   2. Mark Schorer (review date 1944)
   3. David Wagoner (review date 1958)
   4. Harvey Gross (essay date 1965)
   5. Jean H. Hagstrum (essay date 1967)
   6. Stanley Moss (review date 1971)
   7. Stanley Kunitz with Cynthia Davis (interview date 1972)
   8. Stanley Kunitz with Robert Boyers (interview date 1972)
   9. Robert Weisburg (essay date 1975)
   10. James Finn Cotter (review date 1980)
   11. Gregory Orr (review date 1980)
   12. Stanley Kunitz (essay date 1984)
   13. Stanley Kunitz with Peter Stitt (interview date 1990)
   14. David Barber (review date 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. How to Analyze a Poem
2. Poetry