Collected Poems [Hardcover]

Donald Justice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Justice has been sharing his poetry with the world for nearly 60 years, and for poetry aficionados this is a long-awaited collection. Reaching back to 1948 and including recent work, it highlights the significance of the formalist poetic legacy Justice has inherited, and which he will leave to future generations. His graceful, down-to-earth poetic voice gently calls our attention to the simplest of things--hands, a porch, a pair of shoes--with such poignancy of observation or association that one breathes an "ah" of surprise, followed by a feeling of recognition. Justice has a gift for understanding how subtlety and simplicity are effective means for touching readers on deep levels and for forming a bond of mutual discovery. With an underlying melancholy and simultaneous awareness of the impermanent nature of life, Justice does not resist or reject so much as mark passages--the departures that deposit us in new places or inspire us to notice what's left behind. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Inside Flap

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (August 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042399
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042395
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #144,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars you've gotta have this, November 30, 2004

By 

[e-mail] "[e-mail]" (Beaumont, tx USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Collected Poems (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Highly Recommended, July 18, 2007

By 

Matt "reader" (Jamestown, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Collected Poems (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed with Kindle Formatting--again...., January 18, 2011

By 

What's Up This? - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Collected Poems (Kindle Edition)

Just purchased the kindle copy of this fine poet's complete poems, and I am immediately not surprised to find that the first handful of poems are not broken up stanza by stanza and that there are many spelling errors.... I feel that the kindle transcribers of books of poetry such as this and numerous others are completely violating poetry's formal ingenuity by disregarding each poem's structure and sense of poetic style, which are aspects of immense value to both great and amateur poets everywhere.