As far as I know, this is the definitive collection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. It contains selections from six previous collections as well as fifteen new poems. I found it enjoyable and recommend it to anyone interested in contemporary poetry. Justice writes about issues that many other poets do-memory, loneliness, loss, and history-but approaches such ideas with a fresh and precise language. Many critiques discuss his intense devotion to classical forms and techniques, but there is also a great deal to enjoy in Justice's occasional bending and stretching of such strictures. Definitely recommended.

Donald Justice's work is lyrical and traditional, with a broad reach that pulls you in to his vision of the world. Justice's poetry reflects the certainties of our lives and forms a basis for poetic discourse.
Justice often uses mirror imagery in his poems. In fact, mirrors used to reflect the soul are a major theme in his New and Selected Poems. The mirrors here demonstrate the way our reflections show us an inner "face," not the ones we fix for the world to see. Justice employs this sense of duality to represent thedifferent "faces" of human nature. We all have a bright side that we show the world, and, beneath, a more secret self. This is the image that is often fogged, and warped when we peer closely into it.

Donald Justice expresses himself powerfully through an economy of words. His poignant ideas and feelings penetrate his highly structured poetic forms and rhyming schemes without seeming stilted or academic. In accepting the formal and rather out-of-mode forms of poetry, he could compare to painters Sargent or Whistler.

Hecht has to be one of the greatest living poets we have, and Flight Among the Tombs is another example of this. It is chiefly a sequence of poems where Death speaks as or through someone else. It is a powerful sequence of poems set with wood engravings Leonard Baskin. The combination is stunning. The section section of the book is a few poems added, I'm guessing, to make this a book-length collection. Luckily, with a poet of Hecht's caliber, the filler poems are just as good as the main portion of the book.

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I gravitate towards poems in which the space between the poet and the poem is small. I like to feel the heat of the poet's own breath as I read, hear their voice crescendo at lines that I feel the most. The great strength of Henri Cole's collection "The Look of Things" is his ability to observe things from far distances while simultaneously making the reader intimately feel his presence. It is this balancing act that his skills as a poet are at their sharpest. As quiet as many of these poems are, the poet stays embodied, as though every beautifully sculpted line were an extension of his very self. He can describe a beach he sees from far away, or a café he passes by, yet it is as though he describing these places and disparate events from their core and not from a place outside. The poet frequently melts away into his subjects, yet somehow keeps the boundary between the two clear. I do not quite understand how he does this, but I am trying. It was only on a second reading of many of the poems in this collection that I noticed many of Cole's formal choices. Sometimes, for example, when a poet uses end-rhymes, the form of the poem is always in danger of overshadowing its substance. But it is made clear in poems like "Torso", and "The Roman Baths at Nimes" and the title poem of the collection that Cole is adept at serving a poem with formalistic elements and not merely using them to dress it up. The beauty of these poems is of such an intense immediacy and I encourage those unfamiliar with this poet to experience him for themselves.

Garrett Hongo, The River of Heaven (Knopf, 1988)

Hongo's second book of poetry was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1987, an award which usually lends a great amount of buzz to a poet for a very short time. Hongo, unfortunately, is no expection, and not long after this book's release, he slid back into the relative obscurity afforded most of the country's top poets.

Hongo mostly writes in, and excels at, narrative form; a forgotten art in the Eliot-influenced American culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike most narrative poets, Hongo is willing to take the time to remember what poetry is while telling his story, and never lapsing into more prosaic sentence structure while still getting his points across. An example (I opened the book at random to pick it; seldom is a book of poetry good enough throughout to do that) from the middle of the poem "Morro Rock":

And I knew a girl once
who lived near there,
and whom I'd visit,
hitching north, needing her still.
She was the first I'd known
who could sit, oblivious,
still in her long shift,
pull both knees to her arms,
and rock gently in the sand
while a thin foam of sea washed around her.
I'd stand barefoot in the foam
while the ocean percolated around us,
and toss wet handfuls of sand
towards the combers, empty of feeling.
The Rock filled the space behind us.

There's not an unwritten rule of poetic creation not broken in that stanza, and yet Hongo pulls it off without, seemingly, any effort at all. Truly excellent stuff that should never have gone out of print.