{"product_id":"collected-poems-of-donald-justice-isbn-9780375710544","title":"Collected Poems of Donald Justice","description":"This celebratory volume gives us the entire career of Donald Justice between two covers, including a rich handful of poems written since \u003ci\u003eNew and Selected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e was published in 1995. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Justice has been hailed by his contemporary Anthony Hecht as “the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.” In poems that embrace the past, its terrors and reconciliations, Justice has become our poet of living memory. The classic American melancholy in his titles calls forth the tenor of our collective passages: “Bus Stop,” “Men at Forty,” “Dance Lessons of the Thirties,” “The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns.” This master of classical form has found in the American scene, and in the American tongue, all those virtues of our literature and landscape sought by Emerson and Henry James. For half a century he has endeavored, with painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance, to make those local views part of the literary heritage from which he has so often taken solace, and inspiration.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSchool Letting Out\u003cbr\u003e(Fourth or Fifth Grade)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe afternoons of going home from school\u003cbr\u003ePast the young fruit trees and the winter flowers.\u003cbr\u003eThe schoolyard cries fading behind you then,\u003cbr\u003eAnd small boys running to catch up, as though\u003cbr\u003eIt were an honor somehow to be near—\u003cbr\u003eAll is forgiven now, even the dogs,\u003cbr\u003eWho, straining at their tethers, used to bark,\u003cbr\u003eNot from anger but some secret joy.Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925. He was the author of numerous books and the recipient of many grants and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for his \u003ci\u003eSelected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e (1979). He taught at several universities, chiefly the University of Iowa and the University of Florida. He lived with his wife in Iowa City until his death in August of 2004.\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eNostalgia of the Lakefronts\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCities burn behind us; the lake glitters.\u003cbr\u003eA tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;\u003cbr\u003eAnother, by the lake, the times of cruises.\u003cbr\u003eChildhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,\u003cbr\u003eIs fading to a landscape deep with distance–\u003cbr\u003eAnd always the sad piano in the distance,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFaintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling\u003cbr\u003e(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)\u003cbr\u003eOr some far horn repeating over water\u003cbr\u003eIts high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.\u003cbr\u003eAt such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,\u003cbr\u003eAnd this is the world we run to from the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr the two worlds come together and are one\u003cbr\u003eOn dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain,\u003cbr\u003eAnd stereopticons brought out and dusted,\u003cbr\u003eStacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain,\u003cbr\u003eA mad wet dash to the local movie palace\u003cbr\u003eAnd the shriek, perhaps, of Kane's white cockatoo.\u003cbr\u003e(Would this have been summer, 1942?)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy June the city always seems neurotic.\u003cbr\u003eBut lakes are good all summer for reflection,\u003cbr\u003eAnd ours is famed among painters for its blues,\u003cbr\u003eYet not entirely sad, upon reflection.\u003cbr\u003eWhy sad at all? Is their wish so unique–\u003cbr\u003eTo anthropomorphize the inanimate\u003cbr\u003eWith a love that masquerades as pure technique?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eO art and the child were innocent together!\u003cbr\u003eBut landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents.\u003cbr\u003eSoon now the war will shutter the grand hotels,\u003cbr\u003eAnd we, when we come back, will come as parents.\u003cbr\u003eThere are no lanterns now strung between pines–\u003cbr\u003eOnly, like history, the stark bare northern pines.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd after a time the lakefront disappears\u003cbr\u003eInto the stubborn verses of its exiles\u003cbr\u003eOr a few gifted sketches of old piers.\u003cbr\u003eIt rains perhaps on the other side of the heart;\u003cbr\u003eThen we remember, whether we would or no.\u003cbr\u003e–Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299782054117,"sku":"NP9780375710544","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375710544.jpg?v=1767723906","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/collected-poems-of-donald-justice-isbn-9780375710544","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}