COLLECTED POEMS
By Donald Justice. Knopf. 289 pp. $25
Readers soon learn that each literary genre possesses its own particular rhythm, its characteristic feel or atmosphere. When we open a Golden Age mystery, whether by Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr, we expect an air of commedia dell'arte: a period glow, some wit, the various puppets going through the familiar motions of murder, feint and discovery. Just as a thriller sucks us into its plot-driven frenzy, a romance novel creates the soft-focused wish-fulfillment of a dream.
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Michael Dirda's email address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Thursday at 2 p.m.
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To read a volume of poetry is to enter the world of the mesmerist. In a serious artist's collected poems, the single constant is usually his or her distinctive, increasingly hypnotic voice. Without relying on plot, dramatic action or a cast of characters, lyric poets, especially, must entrance us with their words until we cannot choose but hear. Eager for more, we turn page after page because we find ourselves in thrall to a particular diction.
Donald Justice -- who died August 6 at age 78 after a prolonged illness -- has sometimes been likened to that old magician Wallace Stevens. But he is plainer, more overtly personal, without the abundant flow and exhibitionism of Stevens. Most of Justice's poems require only a single page, and some feel as if they end just as they're getting started. His themes are the old reliables, the ones we never fail to respond to: memories of childhood and youth, elegies for the dead, portraits of the lonely, artistic and doomed, reflections on life's shadows and disappointments. Early in his career, Justice liked to play with traditional forms -- sestinas, above all -- and these poems can be marvelous contraptions, true sleights of fancy. Regrettably, some modern readers look suspiciously on fixed forms as mere exercises in linguistic or metric ingenuity, and so tend to prefer quieter, less obtrusively structured meditations.
These Justice supplies in abundance. He is surely, like his few peers (Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht), a deeply accomplished poet, without pretension or histrionic gesture, yet absolutely in command, able to bend syntax to his will or make us pause in wonder at the quiet rightness of a simile.
He can be delicately lovely, as in "Young Girls Growing Up (1911)" (which calls to mind John Crowe Ransom's classic "Vision by Sweetwater"):
No longer do they part and scatter so hopelessly before you,
But they will stop and put an elbow casually
On the piano top and look quite frankly at you,
Their pale reflections gliding there like swans.
The South, Justice has written "has only to be tragic to beguile," and many of his best poems look back on his school days, a long-vanished Florida, an elderly and "artistic" piano teacher, his parents and grandparents:
There stood my grandfather, Lincoln-tall and solemn,
Tapping his pipe out on a white-flaked column,
