Collected Poems

by JUSTICE, DONALD

• ISBN13: 9780375710544
• ISBN10: 037571054X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-02
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

This celebratory volume gives us the entire career of Donald Justice between two covers, including a rich handful of poems written sinceNew and Selected Poemswas 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. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925. He was the author of numerous books and the recipient of many grants and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems (1979). He taught at several universities, chiefly the University of Iowa and the University of Florida. He lived with his wife in Iowa City until his death in August of 2004.



From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

THE SUMMER ANNIVERSARIES (1960)
One
Anniversaries	5	(2)
Song	7	(1)
To a Ten-Months' Child	8	(1)
The Poet at Seven	9	(1)
The Snowfall	10	(1)
Landscape with Little Figures	11	(1)
On the Death of Friends in Childhood	12	(1)
The Wall	13	(1)
A Dream Sestina	14	(2)
Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees	16	(2)
Here in Katmandu	18	(2)
The Metamorphosis	20	(2)
Southern Gothic	22	(1)
Sonnet to My Father	23	(1)
Beyond the Hunting Woods	24	(1)
Tales from a Family Album	25	(4)
Two
Thus	29	(1)
Variations on a Theme from James	30	(2)
Ladies by Their Windows	32	(2)
Women in Love	34	(1)
Love's Stratagems	35	(1)
A Map of Love	36	(1)
Speaking of Islands	37	(1)
Sonnet About P.	38	(1)
Another Song	39	(1)
In Bertram's Garden	40	(1)
The Stray Dog by the Summerhouse	41	(2)
Anthony St. Blues	43	(1)
A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida	44	(1)
Counting the Mad	45	(1)
On a Painting by Patient B of the Independence State Hospital for the Insane	46	(2)
To Satan in Heaven	48	(3)
From "BAD DREAMS" AND OTHER EARLY POEMS (1948-1962)
Two Sonnets	51	(1)
The Return of Alcestis	52	(1)
Autobiography	53	(1)
Two Songs from Don Juan in Hell	54	(1)
The Metamorphoses of a Vampire	55	(1)
Monologue in an Attic	56	(1)
From Bad Dreams	57	(5)
The Furies	62	(3)
NIGHT LIGHT (1967)
Orpheus Opens His Morning Mail	65	(1)
Time and the Weather	66	(1)
To the Unknown Lady Who Wrote the Letters Found in the Hatbox	67	(1)
The Grandfathers	68	(1)
Dreams of Water	69	(2)
Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy	71	(1)
Memory of a Porch	72	(1)
But That Is Another Story	73	(1)
Heart	74	(1)
Girl Sitting Alone at Party	75	(1)
Party	76	(1)
A Local Storm	77	(1)
Variations for Two Pianos	78	(1)
Anonymous Drawing	79	(1)
To Waken a Small Person	80	(1)
American Sketches	81	(2)
After a Phrase Abandoned by Wallace Stevens	83	(1)
Elsewheres	84	(2)
Men at Forty	86	(1)
Early Poems	87	(1)
The Thin Man	88	(1)
The Missing Person	89	(2)
The Man Closing Up	91	(3)
Hands	94	(1)
The Evening of the Mind	95	(1)
For the Suicides of 1962	96	(2)
The Tourist from Syracuse	98	(2)
Bus Stop	100	(1)
Incident in a Rose Garden	101	(2)
In the Greenroom	103	(1)
At a Rehearsal of "Uncle Vanya"	104	(2)
Last Days of Prospero	106	(2)
Memo from the Desk of X	108	(2)
For a Freshman Reader	110	(2)
To the Hawks	112	(2)
Poem for a Survivor	114	(1)
Narcissus at Home	115	(8)
DEPARTURES (1973)
One
ABC	123	(2)
Fragment: To a Mirror	125	(1)
A Letter	126	(1)
A Dancer's Life	127	(2)
Portraits of the Sixties	129	(5)
Lethargy	134	(1)
Luxury	135	(1)
The Telephone Number of the Muse	136	(1)
Twenty Questions	137	(1)
On the Night of the Departure by Bus	138	(1)
White Notes	139	(2)
The Confession	141	(1)
The Success	142	(1)
The Assassination	143	(4)
Two
1971	147	(1)
Lorcaesques	148	(1)
From a Notebook	149	(3)
Riddle	152	(1)
Things	153	(4)
Three
An Elegy Is Preparing Itself	157	(1)
Variations on a Text by Vallejo	158	(2)
Poem	160	(2)
Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens	162	(2)
Sonatina in Green	164	(2)
Sonatina in Yellow	166	(2)
Three Odes	168	(5)
Absences	173	(1)
Presences	174
From SELECTED POEMS (1979)
Little Elegy	177	(1)
First Death	178	(3)
Two Blues	181	(2)
Unflushed Urinals	183	(1)
Sunday Afternoon in Buffalo, Texas	184	(1)
Memories of the Depression Years	185	(2)
In the Attic	187	(1)
Thinking About the Past	188	(1)
Childhood	189	(6)
THE SUNSET MAKER (1987)
Lines at the New Year	195	(1)
Mule Team and Poster	196	(1)
My South	197	(3)
American Scenes (1904-1905)	200	(2)
Nineteenth-Century Portrait	202	(1)
Young Girls Growing Up (1911)	203	(2)
Children Walking Home from School Through Good Neighborhood	205	(1)
October: A Song	206	(1)
Sea Wind: A Song	207	(1)
Last Evening: At the Piano	208	(1)
Psalm and Lament	209	(2)
In Memory of My Friend, the Bassoonist, John Lenox	211	(2)
In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn	213	(1)
Hell	214	(1)
Villanelle at Sundown	215	(1)
Nostalgia and Complaint of the Grandparents	216	(2)
Cinema and Ballad of the Great Depression	218	(2)
Manhattan Dawn (1945)	220	(2)
Nostalgia of the Lakefronts	222	(2)
Tremayne	224	(3)
Mrs. Snow	227	(1)
The Pupil	228	(1)
The Piano Teachers: A Memoir of the Thirties	229	(4)
After-School Practice: A Short Story	233	(1)
The Sunset Maker	234	(5)
From NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (1995)
On a Picture by Burchfield	239	(1)
The Artist Orpheus	240	(1)
Lorca in California	241	(2)
A Variation on Baudelaire's "La Servante au grand coeur"	243	(2)
Invitation to a Ghost	245	(1)
Vague Memory from Childhood	246	(1)
The Miami of Other Days	247	(2)
On an Anniversary	249	(1)
A Man of 1794	250	(2)
Body and Soul	252	(2)
On a Woman of Spirit Who Taught Both Piano and Dance	254	(1)
Dance Lessons of the Thirties	255	(1)
Banjo Dog Variations	256	(4)
Pantoum of the Great Depression	260	(2)
Sadness	262	(5)
NEW POEMS
Epitaph for a Pair of Old Shoes	267	(1)
"Sonya sits at the piano, practicing"	268	(1)
The Voice of Col. von Stauffenberg Ascending Through the Smoke and Dull Flames of Purgatory	269	(1)
Ralph: A Love Story	270	(3)
Couplets Concerning Time	273	(1)
At the Young Composers' Concert	274	(1)
School Letting Out	275	(1)
The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns	276	(1)
A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman	277	(1)
"There is a gold light in certain old paintings"	278	(1)
Notes	279	(4)
Index of Titles	283	(3)
Index of First Lines	286

Excerpts

Nostalgia of the Lakefronts


Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.
Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,
Is fading to a landscape deep with distance–
And always the sad piano in the distance,

Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling
(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)
Or some far horn repeating over water
Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.
At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,
And this is the world we run to from the world.

Or the two worlds come together and are one
On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain,
And stereopticons brought out and dusted,
Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain,
A mad wet dash to the local movie palace
And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane's white cockatoo.
(Would this have been summer, 1942?)

By June the city always seems neurotic.
But lakes are good all summer for reflection,
And ours is famed among painters for its blues,
Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection.
Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique–
To anthropomorphize the inanimate
With a love that masquerades as pure technique?

O art and the child were innocent together!
But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents.
Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels,
And we, when we come back, will come as parents.
There are no lanterns now strung between pines–
Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines.

And after a time the lakefront disappears
Into the stubborn verses of its exiles
Or a few gifted sketches of old piers.
It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart;
Then we remember, whether we would or no.
–Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.


From the Hardcover edition.

---

Excerpted from Collected Poems by Donald Justice
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.