Night Light

by Donald Justice

Includes an evaluation of methods in contemporary scientific history as well as discussions of developments in French, West German, and Marxist historiography

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. He graduated from the University of Miami and went on to teach for many years at Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's first graduate program in creative writing. Some of his students there included Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Will Schmitz and Jorie Graham. He also taught at Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Justice published thirteen collections of his poetry. The first collection, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996.

His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. His Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004. Justice was also a National Book Award Finalist in 1961, 1974, and 1995.

Of Justice as teacher, his student and later colleague Marvin Bell said in a eulogy, “As a teacher, Don chose always to be on the side of the poem, defending it from half-baked attacks by students anxious to defend their own turf. While he had firm preferences in private, as a teacher Don defended all turfs. He had little use for poetic theory.”

Of Justice's accomplishments as a poet, his former student, the poet and critic Tad Richards, noted that, "Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance, and who set a standard for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and subtleties of rhythm."

Justice's work was the subject of the 1998 volume Certain Solitudes: On The Poetry of Donald Justice, which is a collection of essays edited by Dana Gioia and William Logan.

Reviews

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This paperback volume of the late Donald Justice's verse, from 1965, was a gift from my friend and peerless poetry aficionado Carl Anderson, and it is a treasure. Night Light is the kind of book that makes one despair of the current poetry "scene." It's nothing more complex than a collection of brief, fairly straightforward lyrics, but what lyrics they are and what a sensibility they express. They are finely honed, precisely balanced, often deeply poignant, without the slightest trace of sentimentality or histrionics. There is a perhaps faintly overinsistent echo of Stevens in Justice's prosody -- the flat diction, the unexpectedly metaphysical adjective -- but on the whole the book is like a case study in superior postwar high modernist verse.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great poetry. A vast improvement over The Summer Anniversaries, which I will read again because others thought that book of poetry had it all.

[Christopher McCaffery · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was OK but I didn't vibe so much with a lot of it.

[sweet orange books · Rating 2 out of 5]

His poetry didn't convey a lot to me ; not a pleasant read.

[Edvards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps Justice's best book (even past Departures).

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Men at forty, the missing person, poem for a survivor

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the poems in this collection are among the best contemporary poetry I have read. Not every piece in the book, of course, can meet this excess of standard. I have personal favorites. One, 'Early Poems,' tolls the recognition that will make me love a thing:

How fashionably sad those early poems are!
On their clipped lawns and hedges the snows fall.
... Who walks out through their streets tonight? No one.

And I can guess which ones may have been Justice's favorites: 'The Man Closing Up' and 'The Tourist from Syracuse,' for their nuanced precision and mystery.

As long ago as the sixties, when most of these poems were written, Justice is candid about his fear that poetry will cease as a value or enterprise, become a museum art. I think he's wrong about that, but I also understand full well the terror and resignation with which one confronts the possibility - even the probability - that the work of one's lifetime will vanish into indifferent obscurity.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This particular collection of poems is a bit too archaic for my tastes. That being said, there are, however, a few gems. This being one:

POEM FOR A SURVIVOR

Holding this poem
Close, like a mirror,
I breathe upon it.

I watch for some sign.
There is a faint mist
Spreading across it.

It takes hold. It clings
To the lean hollows
As the sun rises,

This sun that is going
To burn the mist off.

I give you chamois
To clear the surface.

I give you this sun.

[Amy Kitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the poem "Men at Forty" best. He searches for the perfect word in the perfect place ending what is nothing short of beautiful writing.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry books ever. The language is fragile, a delicate balance. Each word is vital.

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I re-read it almost every year...wonderful!