Donald Justice is an elusive poet, esteemed but not widely read, and it is a convenience to have so much of his work brought together in one volume [Selected Poems]…. Whatever the convenience, a new book by Justice is always likely to be a notable event; his output has been slight and infrequent, his work fastidious. In fact, as a poet he is that rarity—an artist at once deeply traditional and resolutely new fashioned. He sometimes writes (as in "Bus Stop") in an intentionally flat style, whose effects are predictable and tiresome. He also writes the trendy kind of expressionist poem—though he usually does it better than his peers or imitators—that heaps up portentous images with all the automatism of a school exercise. (p. 640)

But his richest work is in neither of those veins. As his Selected Poems' chronological rearrangement makes clear, he has been...