Looking back on this year, it seems impossible not to acknowledge that the most notable and best volumes of poetry are books of poems by well-known writers (great or late-great) and writers in their middle years. They are either collected poems, a life's work, or new poems completing or adding to a substantial body of work. Poet Charles Wright once said about the late Donald Justice that he "gave himself the hardest set of instructions of any poet," then produced poems of great formal elegance, tough-mindedness and intelligent music. Justice's "Collected Poems" (Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $25) displays his seemingly infinite variations on composition and a deft sure grace that characterizes every line. From a poem written about Miami, his birthplace:
A year of remarkable poetry
And the great bourgeois criminals safely lodged
Under the tile roofs of the first suburbs,
Living their lives out, bloody and circumspect,
While on quiet corners, in the morning light,
New schools stood humbly waiting for their children.
Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was a true poet of the 20th century, and his poems reflect that history: work in the Resistance movement in Poland in World War II, life under Communism, years in America. The poems in "Second Space" (Ecco: 112 pp., $23.95), translated by the author with the distinguished poet Robert Hass, are new, written before his death this year at 93. His powerful spirit of inquiry remains undimmed here, though his dream-like lyrical interrogation of mortality is either despairing or lighted with a brave hope.
It is interesting to think that Milosz had a sensibility much like Justice's -- but the events of his life forever altered his voice, gave it lyric and manifesto timbre, and ultimately confirmed a poet's allegiance to an eternal aesthetic climate:
I was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise....
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
Jean Valentine's "Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003" (Wesleyan University Press: 286 pp., $29.95) won this year's National Book Award -- late recognition for this neglected poet of quiet lyric force. The term "innovative" can be legitimately applied to Valentine, and unlike much "experimental" poetry, these are poems of intense pathos and great emotional depth. She has been perfecting this startling self-erasing style, the Valentine voice, for years.
