[Selected Poems] is Justice at his best, as plain and poignant as he is fragmentary and narrow…. Consisting of shadows cast by the world just before dusk, his poetry is not the "bright shadow" that experience itself casts on the world. Justice does not aspire to be our Confessor; he confesses (touchingly, at his best) for himself….

[The] collection as a whole reflects an uncertain talent that has not been turned to much account. For one thing influence has been a problem. The early poems unwittingly feature Auden and, divergent but starting from the same place in dismay, like the second hand of a clock, John Crowe Ransom…. [Both] poets serve his mock-spry sense of form. Yet we want from poets not other poets at one remove, but the new.

The same complaint must be made of some of Justice's more recent work, in which the sense of...