‘In the deserted schoolyard at twilight’

I’m working my way through the collected poems of the American poet Donald Justice (1925 – 2004). Half a dozen of his poems turn up regularly in anthologies, and deservedly so. Here’s ‘On the Death of Friends in Childhood’ in its entirety:

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.

Here are the last three stanzas of ‘Men at Forty’

‘And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

He’s good, but I don’t think I want 300 pages of his poems. He made a very good beginning in the sixties, went through a dull patch in the seventies before a return to mostly autobiographical form in the eighties and nineties. I’m trying to decide what I want to keep (copy, photocopy..). I like doing this, it’s not a chore. I have a clear sense of which poems work and which ones don’t. But what strikes me is that I would be hard put to explain how I know.

Of the poems that don’t work I tend to say things like this; they don’t resonate, or haunt me, or arrest my attention. They don’t lift off the page. I could live without them. They’re good, but not good enough. They’re good, but marred by a weak line, or poor choice of words. They start well but go nowhere. They end well, but take a weary while to get there. And the opposite for the good ones. What it amounts to is a list of my reactions, but it doesn’t really say why I have those reactions. That’s the difficult bit. When I read poetry reviews I’m on the lookout for attempts at it: saying why this is or is not good poetry.

I found tucked inside the collected poems a review, by David Barber from an American poetry magazine. I don’t know which one, there’s nothing at the top or bottom of the pages. He has a good try at pinning down what’s good, and what’s forgettable about Donald Justice:

‘There wasn’t an epic bone in his body. The Thin Man kept a safe and, you might say, reproachful distance from any overweening ambition and overwrought emotion, or bravura of any stripe: when his tidy verses ran onto a second page, you could almost hear a dry little cough as he begged the reader’s pardon……. Justice had from the start an uncanny aptitude for charging bare atmospheric detail with pensive implication……. not just the best words in the best order but the fewest that could be summoned for maximum effect………(like Larkin) possessing a sixth sense for the anomie of the ordinary…..”Men at Forty” has to be the best Larkin poem that Larkin never wrote’

And on an example of a weaker poem: ‘it isn’t so much that it reads like a little machine made of words but that it’s a prototype for the boilerplate diction and generic tropes of a thousand flimsy workshop knockoffs’

Harsh, but I like that kind of reviewing; precise about the nature of the successes, and unafraid to pinpoint the failures. At least then we know what we’re letting ourselves in for.