rev. of New and Selected Poems by Donald Justice
New and Selected Poems
Poems by Donald Justice. Knopf, $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Liam Rector.
Donald Justice’s
New and Selected Poems, which includes work from six of his earlier books and features fifteen new poems, begins with this two-line poem, entitled “On a Picture by Burchfield”: “Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours. / Already your agony has outlasted ours.”
It’s a befitting opening to the book, since there is something very abiding about the poems of Donald Justice, both in their subjects and in the very fluid sense of form that variously provides their ground, air, and horizon — their music here on earth. There is something enduring about his work as well. I suspect readers will be pulling
New and Selected Poems off their shelves for years to come to make sense of the major and minor occasions of their lives.
Justice seems never to have published a poem or a book of poems before its time. Few other poets — Frank Bidart among contemporaries and Elizabeth Bishop among moderns — can lay claim to less having been so much more. Each of Justice’s books has been a kind of publishing event, and this one is no exception.
Books of selected poems used to be published only towards the end of a poet’s life, to put a cap upon a lifetime’s work. Now we inhabit a culture wherein a book of poems (or to say most books) has a shelf life roughly comparable to that of yogurt. Books of poems go out of print quickly, and volumes of selected poems are needed
en route to acquaint and reacquaint readers with a poet’s ongoing body of work. Hence, Justice’s earlier
Selected Poems, published sixteen years ago. Notwithstanding newer work still,
New and Selected Poems now replaces that earlier
Selected as the definitive edition of Justice’s work in progress.
The book also includes an excerpt from
Bad Dreams, a verse play, and adds back in several poems omitted from the earlier
Selected, including the unforgettable “Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees.” The new poems in the book — especially “Body and Soul,” “Pantoum of the Great Depression,” and “Dance Lessons of the Thirties” — stand among Justice’s finest work. The first stanza of the latter poem exemplifies vintage Justice moves and rhymes: “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.”
New and Selected Poems reminds us not just of Justice as a master of inherited forms, but also as a master of the tones and emotions of nostalgia, a bittersweet longing for the things, persons, and situations of the past. From his earliest work, Justice has looked upon time from the vantage point of an older man. He writes not only of the powers that be, but also of what he calls the “Powers-That-Once-Were.” His are poems of strong sentiment, though never sentimental, and their emotions will endure because, to twist Pound a bit, they have been objectified by such a strong style. Pure style — what Donald Hall has called “the glass of water.”
Philip Larkin once said facetiously that he cared only for content in his poems, and the mockingness of his remark might also apply to Justice’s work. With a stylist as accomplished as Justice, it often seems, as a consequence of his music, that we are in the midst of sheer, pure content.
Liam Rector is the author of two books of poems, The Sorrow of Architecture
and American Prodigal.
He directs the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College.
