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Collected Poems - Hardcover

Justice, Donald

 
9781400042395: Collected Poems

Inhaltsangabe

A tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's career features the writer's theme of classic American melancholy and includes such pieces as "Bus Stop," "Men at Forty," "Crossing Kansas by Train," "The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925. He is the author of numerous books and is the recipient of many grants and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems (1979). He has taught at several universities, chiefly the University of Iowa and the University of Florida. He lives with his wife in Iowa City.

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Nostalgia of the Lakefronts


Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.
Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,
Is fading to a landscape deep with distance–
And always the sad piano in the distance,

Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling
(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)
Or some far horn repeating over water
Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.
At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,
And this is the world we run to from the world.

Or the two worlds come together and are one
On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain,
And stereopticons brought out and dusted,
Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain,
A mad wet dash to the local movie palace
And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane's white cockatoo.
(Would this have been summer, 1942?)

By June the city always seems neurotic.
But lakes are good all summer for reflection,
And ours is famed among painters for its blues,
Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection.
Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique–
To anthropomorphize the inanimate
With a love that masquerades as pure technique?

O art and the child were innocent together!
But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents.
Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels,
And we, when we come back, will come as parents.
There are no lanterns now strung between pines–
Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines.

And after a time the lakefront disappears
Into the stubborn verses of its exiles
Or a few gifted sketches of old piers.
It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart;
Then we remember, whether we would or no.
–Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.

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