Collected Poems

This collection is an excellent book to add to your library. It has a large collaboration of Donald Justice's works. The only thing that was slightly disappointing, but was to be expected is the fact that some of the books were excerpts. Overall an enjoyable read and a wise purchase for both poetry and Donald Justice fans.

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.

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.