Poet of the Month

January's Featured Poet
Donald Justice (1925-2004) -- pictured in Middletown CT -- was born in Miami, Florida, and earned a BA at Miami University and a Ph.D. at Iowa University. At Iowa he taught in a highly successful MFA writers program which became a model across the nation. He has brought out 13 collections of poetry, many of them award-winning volumes. His Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 1980. Poet and critic Tad Richards said, "Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance.”

A Map of Love
Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

Further Reading: Collected Poems, 2006 and New & Selected Poems, 1997, both by Donald Rodney Justice.

Coming in February: Elizabeth Alexander, up-coming Presidential Inauguration Poet.

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson