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The Summer Anniversaries
Dust jacket soiled, book fine.
- GenresPoetry
58 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1960
28 people want to read
About the author
Donald Justice
61 books24 followersDonald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. He graduated from the University of Miami and went on to teach for many years at Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's first graduate program in creative writing. Some of his students there included Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Will Schmitz and Jorie Graham. He also taught at Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Justice published thirteen collections of his poetry. The first collection, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996.
His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. His Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004. Justice was also a National Book Award Finalist in 1961, 1974, and 1995.
Of Justice as teacher, his student and later colleague Marvin Bell said in a eulogy, “As a teacher, Don chose always to be on the side of the poem, defending it from half-baked attacks by students anxious to defend their own turf. While he had firm preferences in private, as a teacher Don defended all turfs. He had little use for poetic theory.”
Of Justice's accomplishments as a poet, his former student, the poet and critic Tad Richards, noted that, "Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance, and who set a standard for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and subtleties of rhythm."
Justice's work was the subject of the 1998 volume Certain Solitudes: On The Poetry of Donald Justice, which is a collection of essays edited by Dana Gioia and William Logan.
Justice published thirteen collections of his poetry. The first collection, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996.
His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. His Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004. Justice was also a National Book Award Finalist in 1961, 1974, and 1995.
Of Justice as teacher, his student and later colleague Marvin Bell said in a eulogy, “As a teacher, Don chose always to be on the side of the poem, defending it from half-baked attacks by students anxious to defend their own turf. While he had firm preferences in private, as a teacher Don defended all turfs. He had little use for poetic theory.”
Of Justice's accomplishments as a poet, his former student, the poet and critic Tad Richards, noted that, "Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance, and who set a standard for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and subtleties of rhythm."
Justice's work was the subject of the 1998 volume Certain Solitudes: On The Poetry of Donald Justice, which is a collection of essays edited by Dana Gioia and William Logan.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 12, 2020
3 1/2 stars
August 26, 2021
3 ½ but I always try to round up. Sometimes I can't. This time I can.
October 13, 2008
What I like in this book is the way the first section sets the context of family, and the attachment of family for the speaker, so that with the second section the memory of family is made a presence that affects him. My favorite moment in the book, though, comes after a string of three sestinas, Justice writes a poem called "Metamorphosis," which is written in sestets, and where it is obvious the word which was supposed to retreat transforms into another word with similar sound.
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February 22, 2018811.54 J96su 1981
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews