Collected Poems
- Book Review,
by DONALD JUSTICE
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Readers soon learn that each literary genre possesses its own particular rhythm, its characteristic feel or atmosphere. When we open a Golden Age mystery, whether by Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr, we expect an air of commedia dell'arte: a period glow, some wit, the various puppets going through the familiar motions of murder, feint and discovery. Just as a thriller sucks us into its plot-driven frenzy, a romance novel creates the soft-focused wish-fulfillment of a dream. To read a volume of poetry is to enter the world of the mesmerist. In a serious artist's collected poems, the single constant is usually his or her distinctive, increasingly hypnotic voice. Without relying on plot, dramatic action or a cast of characters, lyric poets, especially, must entrance us with their words until we cannot choose but hear. Eager for more, we turn page after page because we find ourselves in thrall to a particular diction. Donald Justice -- who died August 6 at age 78 after a prolonged illness -- has sometimes been likened to that old magician Wallace Stevens. But he is plainer, more overtly personal, without the abundant flow and exhibitionism of Stevens. Most of Justice's poems require only a single page, and some feel as if they end just as they're getting started. His themes are the old reliables, the ones we never fail to respond to: memories of childhood and youth, elegies for the dead, portraits of the lonely, artistic and doomed, reflections on life's shadows and disappointments. Early in his career, Justice liked to play with traditional forms -- sestinas, above all -- and these poems can be marvelous contraptions, true sleights of fancy. Regrettably, some modern readers look suspiciously on fixed forms as mere exercises in linguistic or metric ingenuity, and so tend to prefer quieter, less obtrusively structured meditations.These Justice supplies in abundance. He is surely, like his few peers (Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht), a deeply accomplished poet, without pretension or histrionic gesture, yet absolutely in command, able to bend syntax to his will or make us pause in wonder at the quiet rightness of a simile. He can be delicately lovely, as in "Young Girls Growing Up (1911)" (which calls to mind John Crowe Ransom's classic "Vision by Sweetwater"):No longer do they part and scatter so hopelessly before you,But they will stop and put an elbow casuallyOn the piano top and look quite frankly at you,Their pale reflections gliding there like swans. The South, Justice has written "has only to be tragic to beguile," and many of his best poems look back on his school days, a long-vanished Florida, an elderly and "artistic" piano teacher, his parents and grandparents:There stood my grandfather, Lincoln-tall and solemn,Tapping his pipe out on a white-flaked column,Carefully, carefully, as though it were his job. Now and again, the poet will construct punning lines that sound almost aphoristic: "lakes are good all summer for reflection." At other times, his observations take on an urbane bitter-sweetness:Men at fortyLearn to close softlyThe doors to rooms they will not beComing back to. Yet he can turn that same economy to comic effect:Weep, all you girlsWho prize good looks and song.Mack, the canary, is dead. And how can anyone resist a poem that begins like this: One spits on the sublime. One lies in bed alone, readingYesterday's newspaper. OneHas composed a beginning, say,A phrase or two. No more! There has been traffic enoughIn the boudoir of the muse. Some of my favorite Justice poems tell stories. "Incident in a Rose Garden" proffers an unexpected variation on the celebrated theme of Death having an "appointment in Samarra." "A Dancer's Life" might be illustrated by Edward Gorey. At one point its protagonist, the pregnant, bored Celeste, stares out a train window in Europe and glimpses: . . . beautiful ruined cities passing,Dark forests, and people everywherePacing on lighted platforms, someBeating their children, some apparently dancing. In "Ralph: A Love Story," set during the early days of movies, we learn an all too common tale: "Margot, the daughter, twenty and unmarried -- / To tell it all quickly -- seduced Ralph./ She let him think he was seducing her." Throughout these marvelous pages, Justice again and again employs stories, paintings and quotations as springboards: He even turns a phrase found in a spy novel into a wistful, one-line poem: "Maybe you knew Bliss by another name." Narrative conventions themselves serve as the subject for "But That Is Another Story":I do not think the ending can be right.How can they marry and live happilyForever, these who were so passionateAt chapter's end? Once they are settled inThe quiet country house, what will they do,So many miles from anywhere? Being so attuned to the art of others, Justice -- not surprisingly -- is a terrific translator, whether from Hans Magnus Enzensberger ("Don't bother with odes, my son/ Timetables are more exact") or Baudelaire, as in a superb version of "The Metamorphoses of a Vampire":The woman, meanwhile, from her strawberry mouth -- Twisting and turning like a snake on coals, And kneading her breasts against her corset-stays -- Let flow these words, all interfused with musk: 'My lips are moist; and I know how to makeA man forget all conscience deep in bed. . . .' Henry James, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence and even John D. MacDonald are among the other writers Justice alludes to or cites. He can hit off Wallace Stevens perfectly, balancing homage and parody -- "Mordancies of the armchair" -- or announce the third section of "Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens" with just the right sententious flourish: "The opera of the gods is finished." Near the end of that poem Justice puts forth a strangely haunting question: "What has been good? What has been beautiful?/ The tuning up, or the being put away?" Could this be a comment on the poet's own career? Perhaps. Yet Justice concludes his collected poems with work as strong and masterly as anything he has ever written -- a meditation on a pair of old shoes, the description of a lonely fisherman dancing the lindy on a dock. The last poem in the book "There is a gold light in certain old paintings" -- is appropriately stoic, valedictory and beautiful. Here is its end:The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work. One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good. The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar. Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good. And all that we suffered through having existed Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed. This is a wonderful book, and anyone who cares for poetry will want to buy it and read it. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
Justice has been sharing his poetry with the world for nearly 60 years, and for poetry aficionados this is a long-awaited collection. Reaching back to 1948 and including recent work, it highlights the significance of the formalist poetic legacy Justice has inherited, and which he will leave to future generations. His graceful, down-to-earth poetic voice gently calls our attention to the simplest of things--hands, a porch, a pair of shoes--with such poignancy of observation or association that one breathes an "ah" of surprise, followed by a feeling of recognition. Justice has a gift for understanding how subtlety and simplicity are effective means for touching readers on deep levels and for forming a bond of mutual discovery. With an underlying melancholy and simultaneous awareness of the impermanent nature of life, Justice does not resist or reject so much as mark passages--the departures that deposit us in new places or inspire us to notice what's left behind. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From the Inside Flap
This celebratory volume gives us the entire career of Donald Justice between two covers, including a rich handful of poems written since New and Selected Poems was published in 1995. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Justice has been hailed by his contemporary Anthony Hecht as “the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.” In poems that embrace the past, its terrors and reconciliations, Justice has become our poet of living memory. The classic American melancholy in his titles calls forth the tenor of our collective passages: “Bus Stop,” “Men at Forty,” “Dance Lessons of the Thirties,” “The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns.” This master of classical form has found in the American scene, and in the American tongue, all those virtues of our literature and landscape sought by Emerson and Henry James. For half a century he has endeavored, with painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance, to make those local views part of the literary heritage from which he has so often taken solace, and inspiration.
School Letting Out
(Fourth or Fifth Grade)
The afternoons of going home from school
Past the young fruit trees and the winter flowers.
The schoolyard cries fading behind you then,
And small boys running to catch up, as though
It were an honor somehow to be near—
All is forgiven now, even the dogs,
Who, straining at their tethers, used to bark,
Not from anger but some secret joy.
About the Author
Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925. He was the author of numerous books and the recipient of many grants and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems (1979). He taught at several universities, chiefly the University of Iowa and the University of Florida. He lived with his wife in Iowa City until his death in August of 2004.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Nostalgia of the Lakefronts
Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.
Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,
Is fading to a landscape deep with distance–
And always the sad piano in the distance,
Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling
(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)
Or some far horn repeating over water
Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.
At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,
And this is the world we run to from the world.
Or the two worlds come together and are one
On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain,
And stereopticons brought out and dusted,
Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain,
A mad wet dash to the local movie palace
And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane's white cockatoo.
(Would this have been summer, 1942?)
By June the city always seems neurotic.
But lakes are good all summer for reflection,
And ours is famed among painters for its blues,
Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection.
Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique–
To anthropomorphize the inanimate
With a love that masquerades as pure technique?
O art and the child were innocent together!
But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents.
Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels,
And we, when we come back, will come as parents.
There are no lanterns now strung between pines–
Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines.
And after a time the lakefront disappears
Into the stubborn verses of its exiles
Or a few gifted sketches of old piers.
It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart;
Then we remember, whether we would or no.
–Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.
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