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Collected Poems
Collected Poems | Donald Justice
3 posts | 1 read | 1 to read
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.
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review
Graywacke
Collected Poems | Donald Justice
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Mehso-so

I'm just not a very good poetry reader. I really wanted to like this. I love that David Justice is a major 20th-century poet out of depression era Miami - the time and place where my grandparents were struggling to start their adult lives. But I just never felt I linked into this. It had its moments, some very meaningful to me. But much of this felt to me like not very much about not very much. Seems likely I missed a lot.

Tamra I am not a very good poetry reader either; I‘m better if it has a nature focus. I do love Ted Kooser though! Very accessible & observant. Now I think I‘ll pull out my collection for perusal - you‘ve inspired me. 😊 13mo
Graywacke @Tamra I‘m so happy to create some inspiration 👍— especially on a downer review. I haven‘t read Kooser. I feel like i need to see some what an author is getting at within the poem, or my brain doesn‘t know what to do with it. Justice was having a dialogue with works and authors I‘m not familiar with. That didn‘t help me. 13mo
47 likes2 comments
blurb
Graywacke
Collected Poems | Donald Justice
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Poetry. I‘m trying this collection, which I had to dust off. I bought this when i was reconnecting with my Florida childhood roots in literature, and learned Justice grew up on Miami. (The paintings are his. Unfortunately they‘re tiny on my paperback cover.)

vivastory I love Donald Justice. 1y
Graywacke @vivastory oh, cool. I mean I don‘t know of anyone else who has read him and thought to remark about it. Nice to know. 1y
44 likes2 comments
quote
Lcsmcat
Collected Poems | Donald Justice
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TheSpineView 😍 5y
KarmonR Thanks so much for sharing this poem and for including the link! I appreciate it. 5y
Lcsmcat @KarmonR I‘m glad you liked it! He‘s a new discovery for me. 5y
vivastory I love Donald Justice 5y
Graywacke Gosh - I need to read him. Have a big collection on the shelf waiting for me. 5y
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