Collected Poems

Rating:
Summary: you've gotta have this
Review: I haven't read Jean Valentine's work, but I cannot imagine her book being more worthy of the National Book Award than Justice's Collected Poems. This book is phenomenal. Justice almost doesn't write a bad poem, and he writes many great ones. He has a formal mastery and a mastery of free verse. Justice has a way with words, metaphor, imagery, the line, with everything that makes a poem great that few of his contemporaries have. And this spans his career. You get his early great work, which includes the poems "On the Death of Friends in Childhood," "Thus," "Women in Love," "A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida," "Counting the Mad, "Men at Forty" (his best poem), "To the Unknown Lady Who Wrote the Letters Found in a Hatbox," "The Grandfathers," "The Telephone Number of the Muse"--to his midcareer greats (my favorite being "My South"), and even in his seventies he still continuted to write great poems (see "Ralph: A Love Story" in the New Poems section). He's truly a master.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

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.