What some might see as proper formality might strike others as unnecessary stiffness. This difficulty is compounded in the case of Donald Justice, for his poetic sensibility can be seen as centered either in virtuous modesty or inescapable limitation. How you see Mr. Justice at this formal turning of his career depends a great deal on how urgently you feel about scale and subject in poetry.

Mr. Justice's first book, "The Summer Anniversaries" (1960), deals mostly with a poetry of small scale dooms and dim light…. His second book, "Night Light" (1967), continues the exploration of a dim or twilight perspective verging on total darkness….

But with this second book Mr. Justice begins to deal more openly with what becomes a central, perhaps the dominant, theme in his work: The lack of an ennobling subject brings about a poetry that deals with the reasons for not writing. In a startlingly...