Selected Poems
by Donald Justice
Summary
Selected Poems draws together two decades of Donald Justice's work, poems built around childhood memories of Miami, Florida, friends and teachers who have died, and the small, exact consolations of music and formal craft, chosen and arranged by a poet already known among other poets as an exceptionally patient, exacting formalist.
Justice writes in restrained, classically balanced lines, favoring inherited forms handled with enough ease that the form rarely calls attention to itself, even as it quietly organizes the poem's feeling. His recurring subjects, a vanished Florida childhood, friends and fellow poets who died young, the specific ache of looking back across real distance, turn nostalgia into something closer to clear eyed mourning than sentimental comfort, an emotional precision critics have compared to Elizabeth Bishop's. The critic Tad Richards later wrote that Justice would be remembered for a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance and for setting a standard of craftsmanship other poets measured themselves against, a reputation built as much on Justice's decades teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where students including Rita Dove, James Tate, Mark Strand, and the novelist John Irving passed through his classes, as on his own comparatively slim body of published poems.
Reading the book means moving through short, formally exact poems that reveal their full weight slowly, on rereading, rather than announcing it on a first pass. It suits a reader who wants loss and memory handled with real restraint, craft used to sharpen feeling rather than to hold it at a safe distance.
Historical Context & Significance
Selected Poems won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists, the first the Pulitzer board published for this category, were Richard Hugo's own Selected Poems and Dave Smith's Goshawk, Antelope.
Justice spent much of his career teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where decades of teaching, alongside a later post at the University of Florida in Gainesville in his home state, shaped writers as different as Rita Dove, James Tate, Mark Strand, and the novelist John Irving. Harold Bloom later included Selected Poems in his survey The Western Canon, and Justice's reputation as a poet's poet, more influential among other writers than widely famous among general readers, rests substantially on this book and on the decades of teaching that ran alongside it.