SOURCE: “The Wild Braid of Creation,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. XCVI, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 137–49.

In the following excerpt, Bedient discusses aspects of “strangeness” and the imagery of animals and elements in Next-to-Last Things.

In poetry strangeness is essential, whether of word, figure, or development. It is inseparable from the intense concentration that justifies special linear and rhythmic dispositions of language; these dispositions, in turn, cast an eclipse-strange light back on the words. Prose is daylight, poetry entering or emerging from the dark of the moon. …

I have written as if strangeness ought to be potent in poetry—both strong and fertile. What of the authority of Stanley Kunitz, who seems to imply otherwise when he asks what at his age (the date was 1977, when he was seventy-two) is “left for you to confront but the great simplicities. … I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare...