Next-To-Last Things: New Poems and Essays

One of our most respected poets, Kunitz is the author of eight volumes of poetry and winner of a Pulitzer Prize. In this volume, he brings us 13 new poems and nine essays on topics ranging from Robert Lowell to his mother's childhood in Lithuania and emigration to New York. Kunitz's poems are spare and bold, simple in their language, but often haunting and complex in their meaning. He is a keen observer of nature, as seen in ""Raccoon Journal,'' and views all things wild with sympathy and admiration. In his essays, Kunitz elaborates on the ``wisdom of the body,'' and the imagination and the act of writing poetry, drawing into his discussions the work of Coleridge, Keats, Blake and others. Included too is an interview with Kunitz, reprinted from the Paris Review; here the poet discusses the context for many of his poems, as well as his childhood, his religious beliefs, and the power of poetry and his struggle to write it. November 20