Rating: - Mr. Justice as the potential and potent liar in the eyes of the public
Mr. Justice does not write in the ornate High Romantic diction of Keats.

Nor does he utilize those beloved and time-tested emotive vehicles such as that 'dramatic syntax' which was so convenient for Yeats to create drama and romanticized feelings through 'arguing against the impossible'. Hard as we look, we can not locate the misplaced and distorted images comparable to those in Dali's paintings that are so determinedly psychoanalytic. Yet when we put all the seemingly transparent elements of his poems in the Night Light together -- the minimally enjambed lines, the subtle syntax, the diction that is so simple as to verge on mundaneness, the clear lacking of rich and juicy tropes no versifiers can resist, and the nuanced rhetoric -- somehow a vision of utter other-worldliness materializes in front of us, defying any earthly logic we might have believed we possess. Maybe Nobokov was right after all. Maybe 'all stories are fairy tales'. Maybe all writers are liars, and Mr. Justice is simply a better liar than the rest of us, someone who lies through simple and almost naive-sounding language. Maybe that was how he stole and abused our trusts in the first place. But then maybe there is magic in simple words after all. Maybe there is magic in this simple world as well. Maybe by shunning the iridescent 'cloth of heaven', we can actually be looking at the magic of this world for once. Maybe we all should be ashamed of ourselves, writers who believe only in the power of imagination, and the potential of words to be systematic misleading.

But maybe all we see is only Mr. Justice's imagination. Maybe we shall never be able to know the answer to that question. All we do know is that Mr. Justice's poetry absolutely blossomed in the first book of poetry he wrote after stepping into free verse from his more formal earlier endeavors (maybe we all should start from writing metric poems?). The only reason he is losing a star in this review is he seemed to fail -- or maybe not care enough? believe enough? -- to advocate his poetry to the general public, and thus remained a 'poet's poet' to this day, despite all the poets influenced by him and the Iowa Writer's Workshops.