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 compilation that showed Kunitz over a span of some fifty years moving beyond his...