Mr. Justice writes a spare line, and he writes by the line, painstakingly. His determination to get the perfect word in the perfect place is absolute, and if he doesn't succeed every time, he does so often enough to make [Night Light] a remarkable book.

His early poems were lyric and nostalgic. In a review of his first book [The Summer Anniversaries] I said, "The diction … is deceptively simple and spare, but rich in allusiveness." That remains true of the present collection but the lyricism has been absorbed by a new mode—syllabics—so that the songlike quality of these poems emerges in terms of image rather than form….

What is left, in these new poems, is a sense of compassion. What is gained is a voice with a hard, clean edge and a vision to match. (p. 31)

Lewis Turco, "Of Laureates and Lovers," in Saturday Review (copyright...