Selected Poems

by Donald Justice

Justice gathers together ninety of his poems, seventeen of which have never appeared in book form, to provide a volume that reflects the elegance, scrupulous craftsmanship, and virtuosity that have distinguished his work

Genres: Poetry

137 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1979

About the author

Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. He graduated from the University of Miami and went on to teach for many years at Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's first graduate program in creative writing. Some of his students there included Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Will Schmitz and Jorie Graham. He also taught at Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Justice published thirteen collections of his poetry. The first collection, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996.

His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. His Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004. Justice was also a National Book Award Finalist in 1961, 1974, and 1995.

Of Justice as teacher, his student and later colleague Marvin Bell said in a eulogy, “As a teacher, Don chose always to be on the side of the poem, defending it from half-baked attacks by students anxious to defend their own turf. While he had firm preferences in private, as a teacher Don defended all turfs. He had little use for poetic theory.”

Of Justice's accomplishments as a poet, his former student, the poet and critic Tad Richards, noted that, "Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance, and who set a standard for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and subtleties of rhythm."

Justice's work was the subject of the 1998 volume Certain Solitudes: On The Poetry of Donald Justice, which is a collection of essays edited by Dana Gioia and William Logan.

Reviews

[Walter Polashenski · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was superb. I must read again

[Rowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Donald Justice is my favorite poet --- with such a particular control over his words, there's not a better poet to read from the mid-century Americans. A master of lines, sense and intention.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“—The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!” Donald Justice, “Early Poems”

Enough of the ghazals, pantoums, and villanelles already! Did the world not offer a surfeit of subjects for the poet’s imagination, forcing him to resort to these repetitive forms? To think that this book won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980 during the same year that Hugo’s Selected Poems was a finalist (and Levertov’s Collected Earlier Poems wasn’t even nominated!) is simply mind boggling. That said, “Men at Forty” is a work of genius, just not worthy of a Pulitzer in and of itself.

Favorite Poems:
“Men at Forty”
“For the Suicides”
“Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens”

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Justice reminds me of Dana Gioia: so consistent in his quality, his varied use of forms.
Some stunners: "The Wall," "Men at Forty," and many others.
Eager to get his collected work.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 J96s 1979