BOOKS
"He that of repetition is most master"
NEW
&
SELECTED POEMS.
By
Donald
Justice. Knopf. $25.00.
DWELLING PLACES: POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS.
By
David
Ferry. University of Chicago Press. $8.95.
Perhaps
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster
But he that of repetition is most master.
(Wallace Stevens,
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
IILix)
671
It sounds odd until you think about it. Repetition (days, seasons, gener–
ations, behaviors, memories) : to be master of that, ah yes. Or rather, most
master. Of poems too, for unless you master the art of repetition both with–
in and between poems, you will never move beyond journeyman-work in
poetry. Good poems also remind us of how often we are coerced by-and
not masters of-verbal repetition.
Fifteen remarkable new poems open Donald Justice's volume, followed
by selections from 1959 on. Memory and dreams, the past both personal and
communal, our precious and other dead: all these are Justice's subjects, and
all these live in that place the ancients called the underworld. Litde wonder
that Orpheus has long been a favorite figure. He leads us into this collection
through the epigraph, a three-line tour de force:
Orpheus, nothing to look forward to, looked back.
They say he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
He haunts the new poems: flowers at the mouth of the underworld, here
a mineshaft; "The Artist Orpheus," who made up the Eurydice story; a
friend recalled, re-called too ("Invitation to a Ghost"), a friend who once
dreamt Eurydice preceded
him
("And you followed, knowing exacdy what
to expect, and of course she did turn"). More obliquely: a thirtieth-wedding–
anniversary poem; "A Man of 1794" approaching the guillotine (compare
Orpheus confronting a mob, and severed heads); "Body and Soul," all cou–
plets except for two unrhymed words, "back" and "lost" Oook again at the
epigraph's end-words). And finally "Sadness."
Yet Justice's is also an ordinary world, which is to say, a world perceived
through ordinary mimesis. The thirties are sharply realized in "Cinema and
Ballad of the Great Depression," "Banjo Dog Variations" and its tramps, and
"Pantoum of the Great Depression." Or see the porches throughout Justice's
work. Apparendy the South, like Quebec, is (was?) a society of porches.
