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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE SUNSET MAKER. By Donald Justice.
Atheneum.
$16.00
FORESEEABLE FUTURES. By William Matthews.
Houghton Mifflin
Co. $13.95.
THE LOTUS FLOWERS. By Ellen Bryant Voigt. W. W .
Norton and
Co. $13.95.
Unlike most of his generation, whose inclinations led
them to write in free verse and open forms , Donald Justice devel–
oped a virtuosity as a formal poet. And although such virtuosity
might have turned arch or predictable in a lesser writer's hands,
Justice used his to exploit and extend the formal resonance of such
conventions as the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle. In
The Sunset Maker
he has put his talents in the service of fashioning a Proustian or
sublime myth out of the Depression era of his South Florida child–
hood. Like Randall Jarrell's childhood Southern California, Justice's
1930s Miami holds the beginnings of his aesthetic awakening. This
awakening he records in the "Busts of the great composers" that
"Glimmered in niches, pale stars" of the house of his first piano
teacher, Mrs. Snow, who "Could tower above her pupils like an alp ,
/ An avalanche threatening sudden / Unasked for kindnesses." A
trilogy of poems about his three piano teachers along with an ante–
cedent prose memoir form the center of the book, around which
spread the concentric circles of the poet's life .
Included in these widening orbits is a series of elegies for
\
friends, such as the poet Robert Boardman Vaughn, the bassoonist
John Lenox, and the composer Carl Ruggles . The elegies are meant
to show the diminishing effect that time and experience have on the
I
dreams and innocence of childhood as well as on our romantic ambi-
tions. In "Little Elegy for Piano and Cello," all the "Sequestered
mornings in the studio, / The perfect ear, the technique , the great
gift" of Carl Ruggles have been reduced to "one ghostly phrase," a
run of six notes, which a handful of people mayor may not
remember. The most stunning poem in the collection is an elegy for
his mother, "Psalm and Lament," in which the "drenched and
twisted" sheets of her deathbed become the "very handkerchiefs of
grief." The consistency of tone throughout the volume unifies the
common themes that wind through the poems, memoir, and stories;
the mix of genres works by contrast to emend and extend their
shared subjects. All but the final story, "Artificial Moonlight ," in
which melancholy occasionally slips into melodrama , feels necessary
