The Sunset Maker: Poems / Stories / A Memoir

The tone of much of this new collection by Donald Justice is autumnal, memorial. These tributes in the form of elegies and homages to the almost forgotten - people and places and times past - constitute an attempt, in the author's words, to 'rescue what might otherwise be lost'. Romantic in spirit but in style firmly realistic, they range in subject matter from Henry James' return to America in 1904, to the hoboes of the thirties, to present-day Florida. At the centre stands a brief prose memoir of early piano lessons which leads to a cluster of poems rehearsing and transforming the same material. The book comes to a close with two stories, one of which has a pendant poem dealing with the same material. Justice is one of those authors known for his formal curiosity and restlessness; in this newest work we encounter again what one of the poems calls the 'love that masquerades as pure technique'.