SOURCE: “Stanley Kunitz Shares ‘Next-to-Last’ Poems, Essays with Readers,” in Chicago Tribune, December 22, 1985, p. 39.

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...