Donald Justice has not improved since I reviewed Night Light a dozen years ago. [Selected Poems] reads like a very thin Tennessee Williams—little poems about obscure Florida people and architecture. And yet the words he chooses are the words he chooses; he really does want them, so the poems have that solidity. Each line is a sort of family portrait. That the poems as wholes haven't much energy doesn't matter much because his subjects are People Remembered (muffled by distance), and landscapes dying on the vine. The late ones are eclectic. "Thinking about the Past" is a Stafford poem. His early ones are Audenesque. "The Telephone Number of the Muse" is frightening. "Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens" is uppity. His little fantasies smell of attics. If you invited him to speak at your luncheon he would seem a bit watery. As a career his, though...