Donald Justice was the finest poet of his generation. It was an immensely talented generation, born in the 1920s, with names like Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and John Hollander. Justice was famous for not producing much poetry, and for that being focused on the lives of ordinary people; he wrote much about his Depression-era childhood in Miami. He had renown, too, for being what people often refer to as a poets’ poet. Only after laboring long on mastering your own craft can you best appreciate a poet like Justice’s special music. And yet, there are Justice poems of simple, perfect beauty, as in “A Map of Love” (1960):

Your face more than others’ faces Maps the half-remembered places I have come to while I slept – Continents a dream had kept Secret from all waking folk Till to your face I awoke, And remembered then the shore, And the dark interior.

But the classic Justice is to be found in the poems where his spare, unflashy, and unadorned words were used to make astonishing compositions in sound. Such poems can be considered partially as pieces of music. (Justice studied music, eventually taking composition classes with Carl Ruggles.) “Bus Stop” (1967) employs narrow stanzas, plain words, and three brilliantly placed repeated words and phrases. The result is a kind of minimal (and I use the word positively) orchestra score. Here are the last three stanzas: And the last bus Comes letting dark Umbrellas out – Black flowers, black flowers. And lives go on. And lives go on Like sudden lights At street corners Or like the lights In quiet rooms Left on for hours, Burning, burning. “Time and the Weather” (1967) has a line worthy of Larkin – another poet known for his spare output and interest in the quotidian: “With tears of boredom and of guilt.” It also has much of the Englishman’s (fabulous) trademark bleakness, until the hopeful last line, where Justice takes distinctly his own tack: Time and the weather wear away The houses that our fathers built. Their ghostly furniture remains – All the sad sofas we have stained With tears of boredom and of guilt, The fraying mottoes, the stopped clocks … And still sometimes these tired shapes Haunt the damp parlors of the heart. What Sunday prisons they recall! And what miraculous escapes! The faultless music is just as present here, but without any repetitions, showcasing instead an extraordinary metrical control. “Childhood” (1979) one of the many sketches of Justice’s Florida youth, is also shot through with his particular music:

And Sundays, among kin, happily ignored, I sit nodding, somnolent with horizons: Myriad tiny suns Drowned in the deep mahogany polish of the chair arms; Bunched cushions prickle through starched cotton … Already I know the pleasure of certain solitudes. I can look up at a ceiling so theatrical Its stars seem more aloof than real stars; And pre-Depression putti-blushed in the soft glow Of exit signs. Often I blinked, reentering The world – or catch, surprised, in a shop window, My ghostly image skimming across nude mannequins. Drawbridges, careless of traffic, leaned there Against the low clouds – early evening.

So too is the second part of “Memories of the Depression Years” (1979) which is called “Boston, Georgia, c. 1933”:

The tin roofs catch the slanting sunlight. A few cows turn homeward up back lanes; Boys with sticks nudge the cattle along. A pickup whines past. The dust rises. Crows call; cane sweetens along the stalk; All around, soundlessly, gnats hover. And from his stoop now my grandfather Stands watching as all this comes to pass.

Justice’s unostentatious language was a good match for his often middle-and lower-class subjects. The achievement in sound makes the normal memory of ordinary people take on a glow. I met Donald Justice in the late 1980s, when he visited New York, right after we began publishing his work in the New Criterion. The next time I saw him was during my first trip to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, in Tennessee. This was in the early 1990s. I was at the conference to be on a panel, while Justice was there to read and to teach – he was one of the finest poetry teachers ever. After dinner on my first day, I joined Justice for a poker game. I lost, but Justice did very well. As we walked back in the dark, someone who had been watching the proceedings observed, “Don knows when to fold.” I think this may explain Justice’s spare output. Unlike scores of more productive poets – those whose adoring colleagues, students, and family tell them everything they write is wonderful – Justice seems to have simply refused to play with any of the poor hands he was dealt, hands that other poets, more convinced of their genius, would be off to the races with. He waited patiently for the decent meeting of ideas, phrases, or memories, and must have smiled broadly when he did occasionally end up with an ace in the hole. Poetic genius is located not just in knowing how to deal with the good hands. It also lies in knowing when to remain quiet when dross comes along, to bear cheerfully the long artistic silence it can result in. Justice had the ability to wait out his gift when it went into hiding for days or weeks or months on end. The sporadic jewels he did end up making are, to my mind, unrivaled.