New And Selected Poems

by Donald Justice

The present volume replaces his 1980 Selected Poems and contains, in addition, poems from the last 15 years.

Winner most recently of a 1996 Lannan Literary Award, Justice has been the recipient of almost every contemporary grant and prize for poetry, from the Lamont to the Bollingen and the Pulitzer.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe it's unfair to compare the two, but of the two poets with whose "Selected Poems" I spent time this month, I generally preferred Anthony Hecht for his work's more fiery sense of necessity and urgency, its higher density of intellectual gristle, its more tightly and intricately knitted forms. Still, there were things in the Justice that delighted me: the perfect "Sonnet to My Father" (what sonneteer has never dreamed of composing a sonnet wherein every rhyme is a rime riche? and how many, if any, have succeeded in executing such a project as flawlessly as Justice does here?); the astutely rendered child's-eye view of "First Death" and "My South" (again, the taut confines of the sonnet form present Justice at his best). Where Hecht speaks of morning's "flaxen charities," Justice manifests an equal pithiness when he refers to "waking" and "forgetting" as the morning light's "brilliant trophies." Justice's slant-rhyming of golfers with Balthus is singularly haunting. I liked how Justice evokes one of my favorite themes in literature, the vivid shames of childhood, with the lines "The long days pass, days / Streaked with the colors of the first embarrassments." And how he nails another of my pet themes, the wide distances separating individual souls, with the aphoristic "Horses have gone lame / Crossing the wastelands / Between two people." There is a wry, commonsensical wisdom about folk in reflections like "He had the air of someone / Who, because he likes arriving / At all appointments early, / Learns to think himself patient." A sound instinct for how to tweak a familiar image so that it becomes fresh when he says, "Light leans in pale rectangles / Out against the night."

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This updated collection by Donald Justice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1980. I like free verse poetry which makes up most of these short poems.

There were half a dozen that really resonated with me - which is less than I had hoped for. Not that I found the poetry here to be obscure or the beauty to be lacking but there were many poems which didn’t invoke any imagery for me.

Here are those poems that I especially liked.

1. A Variation on Baudelaire is “La Servante Au Grand Coeur” - a sad poem about how they mistreated a servant. Probably the best poem.

2. Sadness - multi stanza poem that evokes imagery

3. On the Death of Friends in Childhood - wonderful beginning line We shall not ever meet them in bearded in heaven

4. American Sketches - the stanza of the poem to be read at 3 am was especially poignant

5. Men at Forty - highly relatable story about a son being more of a dad now that he is forty

6. First Death - author reflects on his grandmother’s death and funeral

4 stars

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This selection contains poems from The Summer Anniversaries , "Bad Dreams", Night Light , Departures , Selected Poems , The Sunset Maker: Poems, Stories, a Memoir ; along with a number of New Poems...

From New Poems...

Wafts of old incense mixed with Cuban coffee
Hung on the air; a fan turned; it was summer.
And (of the buried life) some last aroma
Still clung to the tumbled cushions of the sofa.

At lesson time, pushed back, it used to be
The thing we managed somehow just to miss
With our last-second dips and whirls - all this
While the Victrola wound down gradually.

And this was their exile, those brave ladies who taught us
So much of art, and stepped off to their doom
Demonstrating the fox-trot with their daughters
Endlessly around some sad and makeshift ballroom.

O little lost Bohemias of the suburbs!

- Dance Lessons of the Thirties, pg. 18

From The Summer Anniversaries (1960)...

There once were some pines, a canal, a piece of sky.
The pines are the houses now of the very poor,
Huddled together, in a blue, ragged wind.
Children go whistling their dogs, down by the mud flats,
Once the canal. There's a red ball lost in the weeds.
It's winter, it's after supper, it's goodbye.
O goodbye to the houses, the children, the little red ball.
And the pieces of sky that will go on falling for days.

- Landscape with Little Figures, pg. 32

From Night Light (1967)...

Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

- Men at Forty, pg. 76

From Departures ...

It smiles to see me
Still in my bathrobe.

It sits in my lap
And will not let me rise.

Now it is kissing my eyes.
Arms enfolds me, arms

Pale with a thick down.
It seems I am falling asleep

To the sound of a story
Being read me.

This is the story.
Week have passed

Since first I lifted my hand
To set it down.

- Lethargy, pg. 101

From Selected Poems ...

Weep, all you girls
Who prize good looks and song.
Mack, the canary, is dead.

A girl very much like you
Kept him by her twelve months
Close as a little brother.

He perched where he pleased,
Hopped, chirping, from breast to breast,
And fed, sometimes, pecking from hr mouth.

O lucky bird! But death
Plucks from the air even
The swiftest, the most favoured.

Red are the eyes of his mistress now.
On us, her remaining admirers,
They do not yet quite focus.

- Little Elegy, after Catallus, pg. 121

From The Sunset Maker: Poems, Stories, a Memoir (1987)...

Sea wing, you rise
From the night waves below,
Not that we see you come and go,
But as the blind know things we know
And feel you on our face,
And all you are
Or ever were is space,
Sea wind, come from so far
To fill us with this restlessness
That will outlast your own -
So the fig tree,
When you are gone,
Sea wing, still bends and leans out toward the sea
And goes on blossoming alone.

- Sea Wind: A Song, after Rilke, pg. 147

[Bryan Neuschwander · Rating 1 out of 5]

Though I did like “Poem.”

[Diann Blakely]

In "American Scene," one of his several homages to Henry James, Justice envisions the "Master" in a California hotel, "brooding on the continent he has crossed." Justice has recently crossed the divide into retirement from a teaching career that produced at least two generations of poets; many think of Justice as the Master whose scrutinizing shadow continues "falling / Beautifully down the pages of [their] calling." But to read this collection is to discover more than one Justice, each an object lesson in a particular type of mastery. The material of his earliest poems--childhood, loss, music, mothers and fathers, the Depression, friends, and the South--isn't appreciably different from that found in the fifteen new works opening this latest volume. What changes over three and a half decades is a gradual enlargement and exactitude of tone and scope, and an increasing use of dissonance.

For example, to write a villanelle about the obsessive limbo inhabited by women in love, as Justice did in his first book, THE SUMMER ANNIVERSARIES (1960). is an astute but hardly surprising use of the form; "In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn," a villanelle from the last decade and one of this century's best, Justice abrades the elegant repetitions with urban images of "toppled ashcans" and drunken ambulations "between St. Mark's Place and the Bowery." Those who characterize--even criticize--Justice for his supposed "minimalism" are missing the point: technical and emotional amplitude aren't necessarily connected with length, but with, paradoxically enough, a capacity for selflessness. Justice's humility before his subjects has been perfected into a craft expansive enough to be not only guided, but cross-bred, by the occasion of each poem as it comes to assume its final shape. For an age that confuses inclusivity with chubbiness, no more urgent, or masterful, lesson seems possible.







(ANTIOCH REVIEW, 1996)

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fell in love with this poet after reading the wonderful poem, "Psalm and Lament."

[Rasma Haidri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely does a poem, not less a book of poems, make me laugh out loud with spontaneous delight, but this does.