Collected Poems

Author - Donald Justice ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Knopf was reviewed on 29-Jul-2008.

Search ISBN:1400042399 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Collected Poems Reference Book. Classifications : 20th Century Poetry United States World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General Poetry United States World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General Poetry Literature & Fic . Click the following link to view the cover of Collected Poems.

Related topics: 20th Century. Poetry. United States. World Literature. Subjects. Books. General. Poetry. United States. World Literature.

1) Hardcover Book Collected Poems by Knopf. I picked up this book on a trip to Boston with some friends. I was standing in the poetry section with another guy just browsing and he saw the book and told me I must read Justice. I highly respect my friend´s literary taste, so I put down the other book of poetry I was looking at and decided to purchase Justice, based solely on that recommendation. I must say, I was not disappointed. I normally gravitate toward free verse for its accessibility and whimsy and away from more technical poetry but I found in Justice a poetry that was both highly technical (some of his most interesting poems are villanelles) but retained a sense of capriciousness while still remaining accessible to almost any reader. In my opinion, he blends the technical savvy of Wallace Stevens with the unique eye and open language of William Carlos Williams.

Justice was a poet in addition to being both a painter and a musician, so his work is rife with references to all three art forms. Yet his work is still fresh and vibrant to a reader who is not well-versed in all those forms. His is not a poetry of exclusion but one of inclusion, inviting the reader to see what he is seeing and revel in the beauty of the commonplace and familiar. His work is among some of the highest caliber of the twentieth century, despite his relative anonymity. Do not miss his work.¤

2) Hardcover Book Collected Poems by Knopf. I haven´t read Jean Valentine´s work, but I cannot imagine her book being more worthy of the National Book Award than Justice´s Collected Poems. This book is phenomenal. Justice almost doesn´t write a bad poem, and he writes many great ones. He has a formal mastery and a mastery of free verse. Justice has a way with words, metaphor, imagery, the line, with everything that makes a poem great that few of his contemporaries have. And this spans his career. You get his early great work, which includes the poems "On the Death of Friends in Childhood," "Thus," "Women in Love," "A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida," "Counting the Mad, "Men at Forty" (his best poem), "To the Unknown Lady Who Wrote the Letters Found in a Hatbox," "The Grandfathers," "The Telephone Number of the Muse"--to his midcareer greats (my favorite being "My South"), and even in his seventies he still continuted to write great poems (see "Ralph: A Love Story" in the New Poems section). He´s truly a master.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
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.
¤

3) Hardcover Book Collected Poems by Knopf. 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.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 26-Aug-2008, 14000423999781400042395, 990-730-880-050-910-991-8

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