I doubt if there are six poems in [Donald Justice's Selected Poems] which could be claimed for the public sensibility. But Justice has written a dozen lyrics I'd call virtually incomparable—of a kind rivaled only by W. S. Merwin or the early Merrill. And it's my sad duty to acknowledge that most were written fifteen or twenty years ago. Justice has lacked the gift for renewing himself poetically; however, the initial gift remains sufficiently impressive to inhibit critical reproaches. (p. 234)

"Ladies by Their Windows" [from The Summer Anniversaries is] … among the loveliest musical and purely evocative things I know in contemporary verse: it never descends to the explicit and is one of the last poems I should ever want to overhear an "explanation" of in a Creative Writing Class…. Sustained at the same level of elegiac fancy, the beautiful cadences move on, in measured stanzaic waves, to...