[In the following excerpt, Ehrenpreis focuses on theme in Justice's collection Departures.]

What draws him to such people is not their dependence but their openness to affection and fantasy, to strong emotions and wild thoughts. For Justice, the receptivity of the artist feeds both his creative imagination and his human sympathy, two aspects of one impulse. Conversely, what seems to matter most to him, in the labors of art, is the chance the imagination offers us to keep in touch with those who share our world but not our neighborhood; the dead, the remote, those imprisoned by their frailty or foolishness.

Justice has marvelous poems about the way the creative process goes: the need to be tough, violent, and fearful at the same time ("ABC"); the difficulty of the effort and the littleness of the reward ("Sonatina in Green"). One that exemplifies his power to charm us is "The Telephone Number of the Muse." Here the poet feels his talent is dwindling; his muse has turned to other, younger lovers:

     I call her up sometimes, long distance now.
     And she still knows my voice, but I can hear,
     Always beyond the music of her phonograph,
     The laughter of the young men with their keys.

The unfashionable refinement of the syntax, like the unfashionable purity of the language, is typical of Justice. Both these features are touching contrasts to his pathos when Justice gives in to the elegiac mood and turns to his central concern. This is with the class of people who sink in the trajectory of their wayward natures, who leave the tribe sooner than alter their own essence. I suppose that for him the poets belong to this class.

The circular patterns that Justice loves sound appropriate to the solitary character of such people, turned back on themselves, shut in willingly or unwillingly, caught in irreversible cycles. No wonder he finds so much occupation for mirrors, guitars, pianos, repetitions of words and syllables. Such images and devices, such iterative and musical designs, suit the meditations and recapitulations of the solitary life.

The dead belong here, because our relation with them must be circular. They prepare us for their place, and we have taken it. The hushed tone that marks Justice's voice mounts to reverence as he evokes his relation to his father in "Sonatina in Yellow." Here, the ambiguities, continuities, and repetitions move parallel to memory and forgetfulness, in a sequence impressively like a musical modulation. Love for the dead suggests love for the past, the poet's desire to keep with him the beauty and awfulness of the filiation that he will hand on in his turn; and the imagination then seems our one genuine weapon against mortality:

     The pages of the album,
     As they are turned, turn yellow; a word,
     Once spoken, obsolete,
     No longer what was meant. Say it.
     The meanings come, or come back later,
     Unobtrusive, taking their places.

Solitude falls into loneliness, isolation decays to imprisonment, repression gives way to murder, as Justice travels across his land of self-enclosures. And we meet the neurotic in the sanitarium, longing to get back to the way of life that sent her there ("A Letter"), or the love-hungry poet (not Justice), reliving in his poems his love-hungry youth ("Portrait with Flashlight"). Because he has the habit of understatement and terseness in an era when overexpression is normal, Justice may sound too reserved. But the intensity of vision that directs his work will be evident to those who care to observe it, as when the poet admits his complicity in the terrors he conveys:

     You have no name, intimate crime,
     Into which I might plunge my hand.
     Your knives have entered many pillows,
     But you leave nothing behind.
                               ("The Confession")

In making these new poems, Justice discarded some of his old traits. He has given up regular meters for free verse. He has enlarged his allotment of dreamlike images and veiled meanings. But his ear and his sense of design are so reliable that the poems remain seductive in sound and shape.

He has not reduced his most engaging feature, the mixture of gentleness with power. The confidence Justice has in his own selfhood enables him to reach out to lives that would unsettle a thinner character; and he can obey his admonition in "ABC":

     Be the statue leaning out from the stone,
     the stone also, torn between past and future,
     and the hammer, whose strength we share.