[In the following review, Pettingell offers a positive assessment of Passing Through.]

Stanley Kunitz has proved to be the survivor of his generation of poets. Born the same decade as Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, and Robert Penn Warren, Kunitz continues, at 90, to flourish as a writer. To mark his latest chronological milestone, Norton has published his ninth collection of verse, Passing Through: Later Poems, New and Selected. The book brims with the enthusiasm and energy we have come to expect from its author. True, Kunitz’ themes can be dark. He views many subjects with irony, sometimes outright skepticism, occasionally outrage. What most impresses itself on the reader, however, is his imagination: perpetually curious, eager for fresh revelation. In “The Round,” he confesses, “I can scarcely wait for tomorrow when a new life begins for me, / as it does each day. …”

Passing Through opens with Kunitz’ brief affirmation of the craft he has practiced for seven decades: “In an age defined by its modes of production, where everybody tends to be a specialist of sorts,” he writes, “the [poet] ideally is that rarity, a whole person making a whole thing.” Against the widespread belief that literature is merely self-referential, and “poetry makes nothing happen,” Kunitz champions verse as “spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity.” Disturbed “that 20th century American poets seem largely reconciled to being relegated to the classroom,” he declares: “It would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meaning cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.”

The poems that follow live up to those pronouncements. “Around Pastor Bonhoeffer” evokes the heroism of the eponymous German pastor and ethicist, who was martyred by the Nazis, to exemplify the kind of engagement with real problems Kunitz admires. Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined the plot to kill Hitler even though it meant lying, dissembling, and putting both his family and himself in danger. He resolved to “risk his soul in the streets / … in God's name cheating, pretending, / playing the double agent, / choosing to trade / the prayer for the deed.” The poet holds up the churchman for being willing to face the ambiguities and pain of existence head-on, to forgo the ideal of holiness and make the sacrifice involved in dirtying his hands with a necessary act. Kunitz similarly transforms an old anti-Semitic music hall song into a paean to Jewish endurance. At the end of “An Old Cracked Tune” the speaker asserts, “I dance, for the joy of surviving.”

“Words for the Unknown Makers” (written on the occasion of the Whitney Museum's 1974 American Folk Art exhibition) glories in slaves who carved cigar store Indians and little girls who worked intricate samplers, in traveling portrait painters and Shaker artisans, and in the legions of women who quilted, stenciled, embroidered, hooked rugs, or wove. All “pass from their long obscurity, through the gate that separates us from our history, a moving rainbow-cloud of witnesses in a rising hubbub.” By leaving us creative expressions of themselves, each tells us something about ourselves, about the human desire to make a splash of color on the drab fabric of the ordinary, to joyously defy adversity, even heartbreak.

Amplifying his theme—“the telling of the stories of the soul”—Kunitz includes some of his resonant translations of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. Like his own poems, they show people willing to risk their freedom and the well-being of those dearest to them in order to win a greater liberty, and to speak out for those who cannot or dare not.

Along with its social statements, this collection offers much that is appealing on the author's childhood. “The Magic Curtain” brings back the wonder created by early movie palaces. “The Testing-Tree” recalls the imaginative games Kunitz created in boyhood, several of which unconsciously reproduced ancient rituals. A schoolboy terror—that the earth would be destroyed by a celestial object—is remembered in “Halley's Comet.” “My Mother's Pears” chronicles the day Kunitz helped plant a tree that still produces fruit eight decades later.

The poet's sense of connectedness to nature extends to the animal kingdom. Some of the most endearing passages in Passing Through concern “Jonathan, the last of the giant tortoises on wind-beaten St. Helena,” who sulks like the exiled Napoleon; raccoons at the poet's Provincetown, Massachusetts home; snakes mating “in a brazen love-knot”; and fierce-looking tomato hornworms who turn out, at least as Kunitz envisions them, to have more in common with us than one might think at first.

The finest of these animal poems, “The Wellfleet Whale,” was inspired by a 1966 encounter with one of the gargantuan mammals when it beached itself on Cape Cod. Kunitz conveys both the awe inspired by the creature in its agony, and the growing sense of kinship felt by those who stood around it during its slow death listening to its eerie rumblings and wails, helpless to relieve the suffering:

          Toward dawn we shared with you
your hour of desolation,
          the huge lingering passion
                    of your unearthly outcry,
as you swung your blind head
          toward us and laboriously opened
                    a bloodshot, glistening eye,
in which we swam with terror and recognition.

Just as the dying whale captures the beauty and fear of being alive, Stanley Kunitz’ humanism illuminates Passing Through. On his 90th birthday he has given us a wonderful present.