Just Poetry

...Ah, those were the days...

...Nothing suffices...

...Somehow her nods of approval seemed to matter More than the stray flakes drifting from her scalp...

...Poor Mrs...

...Snow," a poem to a childhood music teacher that walks a tightrope between tenderness and a disillusioned awareness: Busts of the great composers glimmered in niches, Pale stars...

...I hone myself to This edge...

...Donald Justice died on August 6, at age seventy-eight, and his passing leaves a hole in American poetry, for he was, as Anthony Hecht once described him, the "supreme heir of Wallace Stevens...

...How early we begin to grasp what kitsch is...

...He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his Selected Poems...

...The appearance of the Collected Poems reminds us of just how much we lost when Donald Justice died this month...

...His compressive fusion of the concrete with the abstract shows in such poems as "First Death," in which an eight-year-old wonders how could all her grief / Be squeezed into one small handkerchief...

...In 2003, he was invited to become the Library of Congress's poet laureate, but illness prevented him from accepting...

...Of the scent of the decaying creature, we learn that with the heat / [It] Was turning black...

...Justice's talent for visual imagination is on display in such work as "My South...

...Masterful not only with figurative language, but with comedy, dramatic narrative, witty parody, and all the forms from ballad to sonnet to sestina, Justice ranged over the years from the chilling "Ballad of Charles Starkweather" (a collaboration with Robert Mezey) to the Eastern European wit of a minimalist poem called (appropriately enough) "The Thin Man": I indulge myself In rich refusals...

...Justice picked up the suggestive hint to fashion a creepy noir that combines all three occupations to say something about the failures of the deadened human spirit—and all with punning verbs and cheerful despair in the face of existential menace...

...When the deed is done, that bronze boy Bertram falls asleep, while his victim Jane must lie down with others soon / Naked to the naked moon...

...Justice was one of the finest modern practitioners of the form, with "The Wall" and "The Poet at Seven" outstanding by any measure and a dozen others merely wonderful...

...His lyric tenderness appears in such verse as "To a Ten-Months' Child," which ends with an admonition not to feel tongue-tied and shy: Well, that's no disgrace...

...Born in Miami in 1925, he began his college career as a music student before moving to graduate study at the University of North Carolina, Stanford, and the writers' workshop at Iowa, where his classmates included William Dickey, Philip Levine, W.D...

...Her etchings of ruins, her mass-production Mings Were our first culture: she put us in awe of things...

...The resonant diction of this biblically colored tragedy supplies us with all the Len Krisak's three poetry collections are Midland, Even as We Speak, and IfAnything...

...One of the many reasons to be grateful for the publication of Collected Poems is that it has brought back to view the poet's sonnets...

...But it would be, in fact, a mistake to see sentimentality in Justice's work...

...In Justice's "The Stray Dog by the Summerhouse," the poignant sympathy evinced is marvelously matched by the skill of the rhymed dimeter as the speaker imagines, of the dead animal, that because of the tongue / He seemed like one / Who has run too long...

...Snodgrass, and William Stafford, and his teachers included Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Karl Shapiro...

...What other poet in the second half of the twentieth century dared to offers titles like "Nostalgia and Complaint of the Grandparents" and "Nostalgia of the Lakefronts...

...His name is all names and none, he speaks in the murmur of crowds which surround / The victims of accidents, and he stands waiting, On my usual corner, The corner at which you turn To approach that place where now You must not hope to arrive...

...Still, how nice for our egos...

...BY LEN KRISAK From his odes to old men in Miami parks to his sonnets speaking of islands and his glimmering hymns to southern ladies who sat by their windows, the American master Donald Justice has been American poetry's laureate of something that may look like sentimentality...

...She beamed and softened then...

...As the speaker puts it, Mine is the face which blooms in / The dank mirrors of washrooms / As you grope for the light switch...

...Snow, who could forget her, Calling the time out in that hushed falsetto...

...Justice was able to employ the peculiarly Frostian mode of a playfully malevolent nature as redacted by some speaker's solipsistic narrative consciousness—parodying it perfectly in "A Local Storm": The danger lies, after all, In being led to suppose— With Lear—that the wind dragons Have been let loose to settle Some private grudge of heaven's...

...And shortly before his death, he saw into publication his Collected Poems...

...Asleep, I Am a horizon...

...He knew that the Greek roots of the word nostalgia are both "homecoming" and "pain," and his poems are clear-eyed and revelatory, with a brilliance of detail, a genuine affection for the foolish, and an acknowledgment of the hurtful in the recollections we wrap about ourselves in tranquility...

...So might any person So recently displaced, Remembering the ocean, So calm, so lately crossed...

...And once, with her help, I composed a waltz, Too innocent to be completely false, Perhaps, but full of marvelous cliches...

...And then there's "Mrs...

...pity and horror and tender despair required, as the purple dark must bruise the flowers and a statue of Cupid lose / Eyes and ears and chin and nose...

...No one who has read Justice's "In Bertram's Garden," a mere eighteen lines that tell by subtle indirection and metaphor the story of a mean and degrading sexual assault, could ever accuse its creator of willful self-deception...

...The macabre "Tourist from Syracuse" was inspired by a line from the mystery writer John D. MacDonald: "one of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin...

...But when she loomed above us like an alp,We little towns below could feel her shadow...

...His first full collection of poems, The Summer Anniversaries, appeared in 1959, his second collection, Night Light, in 1967, and his third, Departures, in 1973...

...And the scent came back, / And it was sweet...