Justice, Donald

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you've gotta have this

Collected Poems
Donald Justice
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 037571054X
Release Date: 2006-05-02

Book Description

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.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

you've gotta have this.......2004-12-01

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.

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition)

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"This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson..."
The best American poet you never heard of--
Dark and Brilliant Collection
a dark poet
Kees Combines Harrowing Vision with Darkly Comic Sensibility

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition)
Weldon Kees
Manufacturer: Bison Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0803278098

Book Description

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees showcases the dark brilliance and absorbing vision of one of America’s most fascinating artistic and literary figures, Weldon Kees (1914–55).

Customer Reviews:

"This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson...".......2006-06-21

It would have been sad indeed if the work of Weldon Kees had disappeared into obscurity, as it was dangerously close to doing. Nothing escapes this poets' dark, razor edge sensibility;
the whole thing reads as a kind of pessimistic culture shock. Taking his cues from Joyce and Eliot's "Waste Land", he is pitiless in his assessment of the human condition and civilization.

He is not, however, tiringly depressing like Philip Larkin. He has a voice all his own and it is compelling and vivid. It is pretty obvious that his "Robinson" poems are autobiographical, at least in terms of Robinson's perceptions of the world around him. "For My Daughter" is a poem you will not soon forget.

For my part, I do not believe Weldon Kees is still alive. After reading and re-reading this collection I can't help but see that as wishful thinking. You can't fake this kind of sincerity. I would liken him to Leopardi, Beckett, and other masters of poetic darkness, but he has a voice so individual that he needs no predecessors. An absolute must read.

The best American poet you never heard of--.......2006-03-18

Kees is a master of image, and has a profound sense of time and place--his language has the direct and unselfconscious quality of a newspaper headline, and his meters are natural and terse. There is a lumious, jarring quality to his work that makes you feel like you'd found something important that's been lost for a long time. You have. This is the first collection of his work that has ever been generally available.

Dark and Brilliant Collection.......2005-10-23

Kees is a brilliant modernist poet, who describes the world he sees in dark and apocalyptic tones, filled with biting satirical wit. He poems read like photographic images of the dark reality in which he lives. His style is inventive and original. The world around him is hollow and meaningless, as seen through the eyes of bathers, lovers, scholars, soldiers, politicians, businessmen, actors, and Robinson -- the caricature of the average man of the cold-war era. His vision is the opposite Whitman with a vision that's closer to Kafka and Samuel Beckett, expressing the pointlessness of war and mechanistic civilization. As he writes: "If this room is our world, then let / This world be damned. Open this roof / For one last monstrous flood / To sweep away this floor, these chairs, / This bed that takes me to no sleep. / Under the black sky of our circumstance, / Mumbling of wet barometers, I stare / At citied dust that soils the glass / While thunder perishes. The heroes perish / Miles from here. Their blood runs heavy in the grass, / Sweet, restless, clotted, sickening, / Runs to the rivers and the seas, the seas / That are the source of that devouring flood / That I await, that I must perish by." Kees is one of the best American poets and deserves a wider audience.

--Alexander Shaumyan, poet, author of "Spirit of Rebellion"

a dark poet.......2004-08-15

Weldon Kees has been recommended to me by more than one person. And the reason is that he is a very dark poet, and a very interesting one at that. Kees is slightly outside of academia, though his reputation is getting bigger. I found his earlier work to be better than his later work, that's not to say that there isn't good stuff in his later work, just that I preferred his early work. I'd also recommend you did up a good biography of Kees, since he also has an interesting life.

Kees Combines Harrowing Vision with Darkly Comic Sensibility.......2000-02-06

If the passive despair of Prufrock (or should we say Eliot in a Prufrock mood) could be entwined with the searing wit and rage of S. Plath, the result might resemble Weldon Kees' unforgettable best poems -- twenty of them perhaps, all included in this book. And the comparison with Plath is fair I think, not because both lives ended in suicide but because both were spectacularly inventive imagists and masters of the craft whose poems peer into the abyss. Although this collection contains some of the most harrowing English language poems of our times -- the final poem in the "Robinson" series, certainly -- flashes of black comedy ensure that this book is as pleasing as it is troubling. I for one, find the following lines from "The Crime Club" devilishly pleasing: "Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,/The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,/...The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,/The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,/The note, 'To be killed this way is quite all right with me.'"

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HOLD BACK THE NIGHT

Oblivion: On Writers & Writing
Donald Justice
Manufacturer: Story Line Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 188526660X

Customer Reviews:

HOLD BACK THE NIGHT.......2001-08-07

OBLIVION rates five stars for the title essay alone. No, it's not about the fall of Valhalla, although oblivion is a fit battle for Titans, before they too are swallowed up. Rather, it memorializes wonderful poets and writers who have had only glancing recognition and, should they go on writing after a crucial understanding of what they can expect from their works, still find in themselves the joy of pages that shine with blood and a supernal sense of selfworth.

A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (The Bread Loaf Series of Contemporary Writers)

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review for A DONALD JUSTICE READER

A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (The Bread Loaf Series of Contemporary Writers)
Donald Justice
Manufacturer: Middlebury College Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0874516269

Customer Reviews:

review for A DONALD JUSTICE READER.......2001-05-18

This book contains the author's favourite poems and of his own typical poetry style.Lots of poems and several poses.One will be surprise at the way the poems link to ownself's life.This is a worthy book with many of his well-liked poetry of Donald Justice, the great poet.

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Joe Bolton
My Bible
Haunting, beautiful
Tragic and Beautiful
The best book of poems (by a new poet) in years

The Last Nostalgia: Poems, 1982-1990
Joe Bolton
Manufacturer: University of Arkansas Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

ASIN: 1557285586

Customer Reviews:

Joe Bolton.......2002-12-30

I had the chance to meet Joe the Autumn before his death in a classroom at Western Kentucky University. He had the amazing gift of seducing an entire room with his reading, and helping the rest of us become better poets. Breckenridge County Suite hit the nail so clearly on the head of what it was to grow up in the South, that despite the construction, remains partially frozen in memory. I wonder, mostly for selfish reasons, what greatness he could have achieved were he still alive.

My Bible.......2001-04-05

Whenever I think I don't have any more poems to write, I turn to Joe. He found the rational in the irrational, the sane in the insane. He made everything real. Every normalcy was overturned for me because of him. His need to examine what is right in front of our eyes was extremely... EXTREME. I'm just so sad I never had the opportunity to meet him.

Haunting, beautiful.......2000-07-13

The work is haunting and beautiful. This is an essential book for poets/readers who love the harsh and beautiful light of Raymond Carver or the lyric beauty of classic poetry. A tragedy he's not here to write more. I attended the same MFA program as the writer. He had an affect on the entire program for years.

Tragic and Beautiful.......2000-06-27

What is so notable about Joe Bolton is the superb level of craft, style and especially intensity - which he wrote by the age of 28. In a style close to, but not mimicking, James Wright, he looked at his place of birth and every place he ever lived (which included Miami, Houston and Tuscon) and drew out all the despair and futility. It is as if his poems soaked all the dread and death and took ownership of it, not simply writing about such subjects, but being them.

The best book of poems (by a new poet) in years.......1999-07-07

This is how words should be used. Beautiful. Seductive. Lyrical. Bleak, and underneathh all that, a celebration of (or a yearning for) simplicity. A numinousity emanates from Bolton's work. His verse is intimate, intensely beautiful, whole -- and yes, it will last. He was by far the best of the young poets of his time.

The sunset maker: Poems, stories, a memoir

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The sunset maker: Poems, stories, a memoir
Donald Rodney Justice
Manufacturer: Atheneum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
Donald Justice
Manufacturer: Alfred A Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KO1QQ8

Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State U

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Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State U
Paul Engle; Editor; Assistant Editors Henri Coulette And Donald Justice
Manufacturer: RANDOM HOUSE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OK111I

Ralph: a love story.: An article from: New Criterion

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Ralph: a love story.: An article from: New Criterion
Donald Rodney Justice
Manufacturer: Foundation for Cultural Review
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Foundation for Cultural Review on June 1, 1999. The length of the article is 571 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. Citation Details
Title: Ralph: a love story.
Author: Donald Rodney Justice
Publication: New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 1999
Publisher: Foundation for Cultural Review
Volume: 17 Issue: 10 Page: 34 Distributed by Thomson Gale

Field. Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Number 29. Fall 1983

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Field. Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Number 29. Fall 1983
William Carlos, Simic, Charles, Lux, Thomas, Hall, Donald, Justice, Donald et al Williams
Manufacturer: Oberlin College
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000QD5SVC

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