Late Excellence

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2005 by Jarman, Mark

Justice's sense of other lives is as strong in these late poems as it has ever been. Thus he can write a poem as one of the conspirators against Hitler, "The Voice of Col. Von Stauffenberg Ascending Through the Smoke and Dull Flames of Purgatory," who notes ruefully and ironically, "That through failure one had been spared for heaven after all." There is also a narrative poem, "Ralph: A Love Story." A departure for Justice and one of the best of its genre, it follows the arc of a life from its one moment of happiness to its end in obscurity. Ralph embodies such a genuine sense of ordinary loss, as he recalls an early love affair, that the following passage seems as perfect an expression of loss as we have in our literature:

So it was gone, the way a thing will go

Yet keep a sort of phantom presence always.

He might be drinking with some woman, lying

Beside her on a tourist cabin bed,

When something would come ghosting back to him,

Some little thing. Such paradise it had been!

In contrast to the hapless Ralph who dies "In the small bedroom of his sister's house," there is the gaudy apparition of a costumed figure joyfully dancing alone on a moonlit dock in "A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman":

Whirling, dipping

In his long skirt

That swells and billows,

Turquoise and pink,

Mr. Kehoe in sequins,

Face tilted moonward,

Eyes half-shut, dreaming.

It might be possible to find Mr. Kehoe's predecessor in early Stevens or late Yeats, but that does not answer the question any reader of Justice will ask about the poem, "Where did this come from?" The poet ends by saying, "Sleep well, Mr. Kehoe." If Donald Justice ever wondered about the staying power of his verse, I think based on this Collected, we can say, "Sleep well, Mr. Justice."

Among the new poems of Richard Wilbur's new book6 is one so good that the publisher has put it on the back of the hardcover edition, instead of blurbs and encomia. It speaks for itself and for the heights of lyric excellence Wilbur has achieved throughout his sixty-year career. It would be worth just talking about "Blackberries for Amelia" for the space of this review, to consider its surpassing beauty and aptness and rightness and its equality to any of the many, many poems that this master has perfected in his time.

Wilbur's Collected is a weightier tome than Justice's, and less judicious, as it turns out, with its extensive appendices, including collections of light verse and children's poetry. Both poets ought to be compared. And yet because Wilbur's career began when and as it did, his poetry is often contrasted with the self-exposures of Lowell and Berryman, often to Wilbur's detriment. In truth, like Justice he is a maker of perfect lyrics, each with its unique concern and its own attention to form. Like Justice, he has a special interest in music and has been a lyricist for no less a composer than Leonard Bernstein, in his setting of Candide. His virtuosity as a maker of verse is unparalleled, even by so consummate a master as Justice. But the temperature of his poems has always been a steady 98.6.