In 1975 I took a course at Harvard from Elizabeth Bishop. Her general popularity at that moment can be measured by the size of her class; enrollment totaled five students. Although Bishop had won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she was considered a "poet's poet," a writer treasured by fellow artists but not much noted by critics, and hardly known at all by the common reader. Today Bishop's reputation stands as high as that of any American poet of the last forty years. She is perhaps the only major poet of her generation on whom academic critics and non-specialists can enthusiastically agree. But back then a coterie sustained her modest succès d'estime.

Today Donald Justice occupies a similar position in American poetry. He is our most notable "poet's poet," with all the ambiguities that bittersweet honorific implies. He has won most of the major awards—the Lamont, the Pulitzer, the Bollingen. His work appears in all the anthologies edited by poets, but it remains conspicuously absent in most of those compiled by professors. He is widely regarded as the most influential poetry-writing teacher now alive. His former students from Iowa, Syracuse, Gainesville, and Bread Loaf constitute a Who's Who of American poetry. They include writers in every aesthetic camp. Since his didactic emphasis has been on craft, concentration, and precision, he has founded no school of poetry. Consequently, his work has attracted almost no attention from academic critics. Yet he is one of the few living writers whose verses American poets are likely to quote from memory.

A Donald Justice Reader presents the author's own selection from the work of four decades. Two general observations must be made about this superb volume. First, it is surely notable that so much of Justice's best work can fit into such a modest-sized book. His published oeuvre is remarkably—indeed regrettably—small. Second, it is equally notable how substantial this thin volume seems. His work gives the impression of weight, breadth, and variety. How does Justice manage this paradoxical accomplishment? Like Bishop (or Larkin, to cross the Atlantic for a parallel), he writes on such a consistently high level that he makes every poem, story, or essay matter.

Rereading the poems, one grows so lost in admiration for what they do well that it is easy to forget how much they do not attempt. There are no long poems in the Justice canon—not only no epics but also no narratives of even moderate length, extended meditations, verse memoirs, or dramas. There is not even a lyric sequence longer than a few pages. His medium is the short poem, usually of forty lines or less. One might say that he has spent his life perfecting that medium, but his mastery was there from the beginning. In his first book, The Summer Anniversaries (1960), one finds a dozen poems as exquisite as "On the Death of Friends in Childhood," a six-line wonder:

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.

Within the medium of the short poem, however, Justice has explored an extraordinary range of possibilities. The seventy-six poems gathered in A Donald Justice Reader constitute an encyclopedia of literary form and style. It is remarkable enough to find sonnets, villanelles, couplets, and sestina coexisting in the same volume as surreal odes and aleatory "sonatinas"—not to mention poems based on blues lyrics and nursery rhymes. But surely it is unique to find all these styles handled with equal mastery, to see the same author use such apparently contradictory procedures to produce convincing poems. Whereas another writer might have borrowed an unfamiliar style to try something different in a new poem, Justice somehow managed to reinvent each manner from within. He created poems that were both strikingly different and yet recognizably his own.

Born in 1925, Justice began—like most of his generation's best poets—by writing formal verse. His early work rings with traditional music. It sometimes sounds as if Yeats had been transplanted to the American South. Listen to the opening of "Ladies by Their Windows":

They lean upon their windows. It is late.
Already it is twilight in the house;
Autumn is in their eyes. Twilit, autumnal—
Thus they regard themselves. What vanities!
As if all nature were a looking glass
To publish the small features of their ruin!

Some readers have never forgiven Justice for abandoning this sonorous style, and one can understand their disappointment. (They will be further disappointed to learn this much-anthologized poem has been omitted from the Reader.) These early poems gorgeously demonstrate the magic of the old meters. But in the 1960s Justice—once again with most poets of his generation—discarded rhyme and meter for free verse. But whereas his contemporaries generally began writing autobiographical poems, Justice became a serious experimentalist. He not only discarded traditional form but also, eventually, conventional notions of genre, sequential exposition, originality, and even authorial control. "Experimental" poetry is usually a name given to an interesting artistic mess, the critical equivalent of an "A for effort." But Justice's experiments virtually all succeed. To each new method, he brought an extraordinary control, a formal tightness one rarely associates with experimental verse, especially the sort which displays no overt principles of organization. Much of Justice's innovative work is expansive and surreal, but sometimes it achieves an epiphanic minimalism, as in "The Thin Man" (quoted in full):

I indulge myself
In rich refusals.
Nothing suffices.
I hone myself to
This edge. Asleep, I
Am a horizon.

The careful reader will notice that this poem is written in syllabics. Gradually, Justice was working his way back to closed forms. By 1980 he was once again working primarily in meter, though his poems now addressed the autobiographical subjects that they had scrupulously avoided in the past.

The shape of Justice's poetic development may be interesting, but it is decidedly not what the author wants to communicate in A Donald Justice Reader. He has deliberately mixed his poems to hide their chronology. Instead he has arranged them loosely in thematic groups, as if to emphasize the consistency of his concerns across the different phases of his career. This decision suggests the author's sympathies lie not with critics, who find questions of overall artistic and stylistic growth paramount, but with the common reader, who cares mostly about the human content of individual poems.

A Donald Justice Reader ends with fifty-odd pages of prose—a memoir of childhood piano lessons in Depression-era Miami, two short stories, and three brief literary essays. I knew all of these pieces previously, but, rereading them with the special savor for design and detail that a second or third viewing allows, I felt a keen and unexpected disappointment. I wasn't disappointed with the selections. No, every one was perfect of its kind. My chagrin was with Justice. Why had someone this good written so little prose?

Perhaps the secret of Justice's reticence in prose is also the key to his skill. His prose is almost as concentrated as his verse. Every sentence carries a noticeable weight. Of course, the prose of poets is legendary for its density of local effects, especially in richness of description. Justice's special accomplishment is to have made his packed prose style both relaxed and immensely readable. One doesn't notice how much was said (or implied) until one looks at it carefully. Justice's story "Little Elegy for Cello and Piano," for instance, is only five pages long. The narrator remembers attending an afternoon concert at the Phillips Collection in Washington with his brother-in-law, a moderately well-known composer, who will die a few months later. Simple, intimate, and yes, elegiac, the story is almost over before it begins. Yet how much we learn about the three main characters! Every detail discloses some crucial fact, sometimes about both the narrator and his subjects. This story is a joy to read, but what agony it must have been to write and re-write. It is, however, futile to speculate on what Justice might have written especially in the presence of all he has created. A Donald Justice Reader should be an occasion for celebration, not complaint. Anyone who worries that enduring poems are no longer being written should read this singularly impressive collection.