Donald Justice, 1925 - 2004

Lounging away this weekend, I hadn’t heard the news that Donald Justice had died on Friday until I turned to Armavirumque, The New Criterion’s blog, this evening.  It has a link to his obituary in the Miami Herald.  Over the spring and early summer I had immersed myself in his New and Selected Poems, to my great enjoyment.  Not all of the elements of Justice’s poetic world moved me – the Orpheus imagery comes to mind – but a large number of the poems did.  I don’t want to simply mouth clichés about formal mastery and emotional power, though Justice had plenty of the former and an ample amount of the latter.  Dana Gioia has compared, for instance, Justice to Philip Larkin in terms of his skill, level of quality as well as relative paucity of production. While meant as praise, I don’t entirely find this entirely helpful. I can certainly think of distinct parallels between the two (“Time and the weather wear away/ The houses that our fathers built” sounds like it came right out of The Less Deceived), but Justice’s forms were more playful than Larkin’s, and he didn’t as often go for the killer ending. The dreamy, nostalgic qualities that infuse the former’s work don’t mesh with my predominant idea of the latter’s world - there's no equivalent of Larkin’s rising, consuming bile. No doubt Gioia never meant to push the matter so far, but I especially want to resist this comparison since I first read Justice through Larkin, valuing most the poems coming closest to that which already had a strong attraction for me. But never mind all that. Tonight will be given over to dreaming of strains of piano drifting out of a hot, still Florida parlor during the Depression; to reading Donald Justice’s poems once more.

Thinking about the Past

Certain moments will never change nor stop being –
My mother’s face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune –
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
That red-haired girl with wide mouth – Eleanor –
Forgotten thirty years – her freckled shoulders, hands.
The breast of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit,
Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery’s, a small caught bird –
Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward.
O marvellous early cigarettes!  O bitter smoke, Benton!
And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky,
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
Dusks, dawns; waves; the end of songs. . .

-- Donald Justice

UPDATE: Well, it's just over a year since Donald Justice died and this post was written.  But welcome to visitors from Reason's Hit and Run.  I've posted a brief follow-up in light of the absurd controversy that's bringing you all here up at the top.