Donald Justice , 1925-2004

A song went looking for light
And met itself coming back.

The song with nothing to say
Has gone to sleep on my lips.

Donald Justice, a "poet admired for precise beauty," died of pneumonia in an Iowa nursing home last week. He was 78.

Twenty-four years ago, Justice won the Pulitzer for his verse, and he was asked last year if he would serve as the U.S. poet laureate, though he had to decline the honor due to ill health. His death comes just one week before the scheduled publication of Knopf's Collected Poems, a galley of which was sitting next to my desk--and from which I extracted his short poem "Lorcaesques."

Read and hear "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy." Or read an interview from 1997.