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.
