Donald Justice (1925–2004)

25. Collected Poems by Donald Justice
OPD: 2004
format: 281-page paperback
acquired: 2010 read: Feb 11 – Apr 9 time reading: 6:24, 1.4 mpp (note: I logged 29 reading sessions, most a little over ten minutes)
rating: 3
genre/style: 20th-century poetry theme: TBR
locations: a lot of Miami in the 1930’s and a lot somewhere and sometime else.
about the author: 1925-2004. American teacher of writing and poet, from Miami. He taught at several universities, including the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

I'm just not a very good poetry reader. I really wanted to like this. I love that David Justice is a major 20th-century poet out of depression era Miami - the time and place where my grandparents were struggling to start their adult lives. But I just never felt I linked into this. It had its moments, some very meaningful to me. He does a curious thing where he takes a source, sometimes classical, sometimes recent but maybe from another place or language, and writes his own kind of response. But everything in the response is American. Spanish, French, ancient Italian poetry are responded in terms of roadways, and suburbs. I like the idea of that. But much of this felt to me like not very much about very much. Seems likely I missed a lot, including the heart of this life's work. Justice put this collection together, with notes (and with help), but passed away before it was published.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8115262… (more)

This paperback volume of the late Donald Justice's verse, from 1965, was a gift from my friend and peerless poetry aficionado Carl Anderson, and it is a treasure. Night Light is the kind of book that makes one despair of the current poetry "scene." It's nothing more complex than a collection of brief, fairly straightforward lyrics, but what lyrics they are and what a sensibility they express. They are finely honed, precisely balanced, often deeply poignant, without the slightest trace of sentimentality or histrionics. There is a perhaps faintly overinsistent echo of Stevens in Justice's prosody -- the flat diction, the unexpectedly metaphysical adjective -- but on the whole the book is like a case study in superior postwar high modernist verse.… (more)

Hot damn, what a fantastic collection of poetry.

The best of Justice seems to come at the beginning and the end of this collection. I wish I could describe what sets his good poems apart from his forgettable ones, but I simply can’t. What I can tell you is that it’s evident that Justice pays close attention to form. He seems to love working with repetition, and perhaps that is where the beauty of his poems really lie. Life is so repetitive, after all. It adds up to some sort of quiet meditation. The best come out appearing timeless and classic, and more often than not, melancholic and nostalgic.

One of my favorite poems is “Southern Gothic,” a poem that presents a confusion over the decay of the South and the vague memories of what should be there, but is not. Trellises are “too frail almost to bear/ The memory of a rose, much less a rose.” The ending sticks with me:

“No damask any more prevents the moon,
But it unravels, peeling from a wall,
Red roses within roses within roses.”… (more)

I don't generally read much poetry. And when I do it often baffles me, makes me feel stupid. But I wanted to at least try this book, Donald Justice's COLLECTED POEMS, because I had recently read and very much enjoyed a book of letters exchanged between Justice and his dear friend, fiction writer Richard Stern, more than fifty years ago, before either had become known - A CRITICAL FRIENDSHIP. Justice, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, probably became more famous than Stern, although as a long-time teacher of writing at the University of Chicago, Stern exerted a strong influence on many writers now more famous than he ever was.

So I wanted very much to like this book. And I did find myself charmed by certain pieces, mostly those from the last few volumes, when Justice allowed himself to range into more accessible free verse or prose poems. Because in his early years he tended to experiment with more difficult forms like 'sestinas' which are complex, nearly mathematical in nature, and - at least to me - not very reader friendly. But even in the early books I found poems I could relate to because of their subjects. One was "Sonnet to My Father," with its poignant closing line, "Yet while I live, you do not wholly die." Another was "Love's Stratagems," which brought to mind youthful back-seat fumblings with its lines:

"But these maneuverings to avoid / The touching of hands, / These shifts to keep the eyes employed / On objects more or less neutral / (As honor, for the time being, commands) / Will hardly prevent their downfall."

And there was the immediately recognizable rhythm and rhyme of the old nursery rhyme, "This Little Piggy" in the ineffably sad "Counting the Mad" -

"This one was put in a jacket, / This one was sent home, / This one was given bread and meat / But would eat none, / And this one cried No No No No / All day long."

And in "An Elegy Is Preparing Itself," a coffin, a shroud and a headstone enter into the piece. An affecting mini-portrait of the jobless men and the wandering armies of the unemployed from the thirties is offered in "Cinema and Ballad of the Great Depression."

Justice pays tribute to remembered music and dancing teachers in poems like "Mrs. Snow" (a dandruffy old woman in her kitsch-crowded apartment), "The Piano Teachers: A Memoir of the Thirties" and "Dance Lessons of the Thirties."

Equally poignant and indescribably sad is "A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman" with its sounds on a dock "Of bare feet dancing, / Which is Mr. Kehoe, / Lindying solo, / Whirling, dipping, / In his long skirt / That swells and billows, / Turquoise and pink, / Mr. Kehoe in sequins, / Face tilted moonward, / Eyes half-shut, dreaming."

If I had to pick favorites here, one would be "Ralph: A Love Story" a prose poem about a movie projectionist from an era "when stars did not have names" who flees a romantic entanglement only to die alone, still remembering "images in the dark, shifting and flashing ..." The other would most definitely be "On an Anniversary," beginning with, "Thirty years and more gone by / In the blinking of an eye, / And you are still the same / As when first you took my name."

So yes, there are some pieces here which I did find accessible and affecting. I only wish there had been more. When I am asked if I have favorite poets, my standard answers are usually Frost, Raymond Carver, and the later poems of Donald Hall. And now, perhaps, at least some of the poetry of Donald Justice. Recommended for poetry enthusiasts and students of poetry.… (more)