Donald Justice's [Selected Poems] persistently haunt and are haunted by the past, to the extent that their present is characterised by a weary passivity, a lack of vitality that is supported by fastidious formal elegance. They do not need to say that what happens now is pointless as there seems no likelihood of anything happening anyway…. The poems lack urgency from early on—typically motiveless sestinas, for example—with a habit of elegance which cushions meaning, and a lack of colour and surprise. He will over-explain his material, flattening a striking comparison of a childhood memory with a [D.W.] Griffith film by including: 'But already the silent world is lost forever'…. The poems occupy a cultured space, as aware of European poetry as of American (though in a way typical too of the British awareness of American poetry, that of a couple of generations earlier)—but with...