[In the following review, Idema offers a favorable assessment of Next-to-Last Things.]

There is an appropriateness, somehow, in turning to Next-to-Last Things in this, the waning of the year. It is that kind of book. Portrait of the artist as an old man. One pictures the 80–year-old poet rummaging among the scraps of his late harvest, musing over what to reject, what to save, fretting over a word or phrase that at the moment seems somehow vagrant, smiling to himself at the felicitousness of “Seedcorn and Windfall” under which he groups the lesser pieces at the end, reluctant finally to let anything go. The penultimate title of the book rings wistful. It seems to say, I'm not quite finished.

“To a poet of my age,” he writes, “each new poem presents itself in a double aspect, as a separate entity demanding to be perfected and, conversely, as an extension of the lifework, to which it is joined by invisible psychic filaments. In this latter aspect, all the poems of a lifetime can be said to add up to a single poem … one that is never satisfied with itself, never finished.”

There is beauty and wisdom in this modest book, although its ultimate success may be measured by how many readers it sends to the bookstores in search of more comprehensive Kunitz collections. Having The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978 at hand while reading Next-to-Last Things is helpful, even essential. The new book contains only a dozen short poems; the bulk of the text consists of essays and reflections on life and on poets and poetry—Whitman, Keats and Lowell most prominently—with several references to poems of his own that are not included. Particularly in an interview that appeared in a 1982 issue of Paris Review and is reproduced here, significant works from the poet's long but comparatively unprolific career are discussed in specific detail. Assuming the general reader's familiarity with them is assuming too much.

On the other hand, while there are rich rewards to be had from searching out vintage Kunitz in previous collections, perusing this slim new sampler is not without its own pleasures. The poems that open the book are leaner than those from the early and middle years, narrower on their pages. “I've tried to squeeze the water out of my poems,” Kunitz says in the interview. Some of them are serene and melancholy, as you might expect. Most reflect the sky-and-weather environment of his Provincetown summer home, where he is most comfortable confronting “the great simplicities.” But the best ones are full of action and vivid imagery. “Raccoon Journal,” for all its humorous celebration of this precocious night prowler, has a preternatural ring to it, while “The Wellfleet Whale,” without being the slightest bit obvious, is full of the wonder and dread of Herman Melville.

There aren't many poets of Kunitz's generation still productive; still around, even. Robert Penn Warren comes most readily to mind. But I am more reminded of Robert Frost (though he would be 110 if he were still alive!), particularly in the discussions of the nature of poetry, its basic properties. Both poets insisted that an independent life-force is part of a good poem's essence. Frost noted “a course of lucky events” that a poem takes, “finding its own name as it goes” before it “ends in a clarification of life … a momentary stay against confusion.”

Kunitz says in the Paris Review interview: “A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. It takes on a life and a will of its own. It might have proceeded differently—toward catastrophe, resignation, terror, despair—and I still would have to claim it.”