The Christian Humanism of A.M. Juster

Wonder and Wrath by A.M. Juster
Paul Dry Books, 2020; pp. 77; $14.95
Review by James Matthew Wilson

My recommendation of this new book of A.M. Juster’s poems must be made by way of a rather personal note: one of the sort that I normally would not think to include in a book review. As I read through the volume, I found myself, on three different occasions, setting it down in order to write a poem of my own. That could be irrelevant to the quality of Juster’s poems, but, when it happened for a third time, I was reminded of something.

In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry observes the telltale sign of an encounter with beauty: “Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.” From this she concludes, “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.” Diotima tells Socrates, in the Symposium, that a soul that perceives the eternal sea of beauty is moved to reproduction: the begetting of children, or of poems and laws, of noble acts and ideas. So it was with Dante, Scarry observes, who saw “the beauty of Beatrice” and not only found himself drawing angels as he dreamed of her, but wrote sonnet after sonnet after sonnet.

The ancient test of everything was its fruitfulness. What is good begets good things, truth leads to truth, but beauty has always had a distinctive place in that it is infinitely engendering just as Diotima suggests. Beauty indeed is the pinnacle of fruitfulness insofar as we find the endless begetting of delight in its contemplation. I have given a great deal of thought to beauty’s role in the scheme of things, but what is most striking about beauty is that it is less important to have the proper idea of it, at least at first, than it is simply to respond to it. It is the highest possible praise, then, to remark that, without being conscious of it, I found myself trying to beget and beget anew in response to the poems in Juster’s book.

Just so did I find myself responding to this brief, opening poem which draws so near to the surface of beauty that the whole of the thing being described almost disappears:

I know that I was suckered in:
firm curves bulging, olive skin,
perfectly well-rounded cheeks
rubified with port-wine streaks,
the saffron crown with one deep crack,
an eggplant-colored nob in back—
a touch of tumor. It would still
be sunning on my windowsill—
art illustrating daily life—
except I took my carving knife
and slowly sliced five slabs of fresh,
soil-sweet, yet vaguely bitter flesh.

The minute, closely focused attention, which savors shade’s distinction from shade, reveals to us a beauty that is the literal fruitfulness of an heirloom tomato.

It is normally the critic’s task to situate a poet’s work within the span of the poet’s career and that career within the tradition in which the poet works. But it is of primary importance to establish that the poet is worth such study and situation in the first place, and this Juster plainly establishes with this volume.

Many years ago, I ran into Juster, while slipping my way through a large crowd, at a reception at the annual West Chester poetry conference. “Oh,” I said, reading his nametag, “A.M. Juster. I like your poems.” I knew them only from the small magazine The Formalist, which was the place where I first encountered the work of most of the contemporary poets I enjoy. He looked at me with befuddlement that I should recognize him. At the time, he had published only a small book of translations and his Richard Wilbur award-winning volume of original poems, The Secret Language of Women (2003). I didn’t think to stop and chat, but continued to wend my narrow path.

These years on, Juster has become a distinctly recognizable figure who stands out from a very large crowd, and not only because Paul Mariani published an “exposé” of sorts, in the pages of First Things, revealing that A.M. Juster is a pen name for Michael Astrue, retired Washington bureaucrat. He stands out, rather, because he has published several volumes of important translations from the Latin of Horace, Tibullus, Aldhelm, and John Milton, with a complete verse translation of the poems of Petrarch due out next year. Translators fluent not only in the language of their authors but in English prosody are rare in our time, and Juster (along with Sarah Ruden) is among the best of them, certainly the most consistently good.

Amid the work of translation, there has been relatively little original poetry. Since the first book of poems, Juster has published just two volumes of comic verse, the large and various Sleeze and Slander and the narrow and sharply satiric The Billy Collins Experience (both 2015). This new volume thus makes a quiet but pointed assertion. A slender book, it recollects some of Juster’s translations along with original poems and does so in order to make the lines of his work as an integral whole visible at last. Dana Gioia writes in his endorsement of the book that Juster has “displayed mastery of so many modes and manners that it was sometimes difficult to bring his artistic personality into focus.” Wonder and Wrath is the overdue attempt to bring his work into focus.

In this review, which began with the indulgence of risking an irrelevant observation, let me indulge also in a brief digression. Most poets publish their work initially in magazines and, for most readers, a given poet is never more than the name associated with one or two, perhaps a handful of, poems scattered across years. The best-known poems in our tradition are “anthology pieces,” preserved for immortality but cut off from the rest of their authors’ body of work. For the high school student studying a textbook or the casual reader who has picked up an anthology at the bookstore and sets it by the reading chair, this will be all they ever see or think of the poet.

And yet the serious reader wants more than a clutch of poems and wants more, also, than a great number of poems. The serious reader (and the literary critic, I might add) wants the individual poems to combine together to create one more poem than the actual number of poems the author has written: the poem of all these things together as they reveal a single, unified personality or character. Eliot observed as much about Shakespeare, when he wrote,

The whole of Shakespeare’s work is one poem; and it is the poetry of it in this sense, not the poetry of isolated lines and passages or the poetry of the single figures which he created, that matters most. A man might, hypothetically, compose any number of fine passages or even of whole poems which would each give satisfaction, and yet not be a great poet, unless we felt them to be united by one significant, consistent, and developing personality.

What then is Juster’s personality? We have mentioned his fluency as a translator; to that we add his variety and mastery of form. In this volume, we find tetrameter and pentameter couplets, Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, syllabics, blank-verse villanelles and pantoums, and several sonnets (Juster has won the Howard Nemerov sonnet award three times), in addition to many other rhymed stanzas. We find also a facility of movement from light and epigrammatic verse to lyrics of serious and grave voice.

For Juster, the question is what sort of gravity shall be the honest one. In his criticism, he has expressed contempt for the self-indulgent maniacal excesses of many modern writers that did harm to others in the name of artistic genius. His contempt appears subtly in this volume, in the sonnet, “No,” where he refuses to “celebrate” another artist’s suicide by composing one of those “knee-jerk elegies” that “perpetrate / Plath’s nightshade lies.” Sylvia Plath is just one among many poets whose self-regard was transformed by self-extinction into posthumous celebrity. Juster would chasten rather than indulge such destruction.

Juster might have elected to look at such mortal vanity with the disenchanted eyes of the unheeded prophet who can do no more than bear witness to human folly. Such a posture is entertained in another sonnet, “Cassandra.” There, the prophetess laments, “Lush memories decay before my eyes. / I sense which virgin will be raped today, / which nation crumbles.” But this also proves too self-aggrandizing a perspective for our poet. Why? An answer is not far to find.

In several poems, we are given brief scenes of prolonged illness, the fatality of a degenerative condition, and the humiliation of a mind subject to the body’s failings. Such is the theme of “I Sit Half-Naked,” which begins:

with my socks still on, my gown half-open
because this teaching hospital believes
that dignity disrupts efficiency,
and all there is for anyone to read
is one brochure in Spanish: EL DOLOR,
which after thirty-seven minutes gets
my full attention . . .

The poem continues as one long sentence for another twenty lines, until the doctor interrupts with an efficient, cheery, oblivious, “So how are we today?”

Such a sense of mortality as a slow humiliation, one that curtails our instinct for self-dramatization, has its roots in early-modern humanism. Montaigne remains, for us, the great philosopher of humility before nature, where “nature” means the slow decline of things. For Montaigne, to hear the stoic ethical imperative to “follow nature,” entails accepting that certain kinds of greatness and glory are simply impossible. Further, pain and illness are useful insofar as the possibility of escaping from them might—possibly, eventually—make death seem not so bad. Juster is no Montaigne in his melancholy, but he is akin to Montaigne in seeing the limitations of body as a lesson in accepting our limits. His poems follow nature morally while his verse follows nature by obeying metrical law.

Juster’s particular humanism shows itself most elegantly in his sonnets: one retells the sparring of husband and wife over the cost of landscaping, with the wife’s apparent prodigality paying off in the beauty of a Japanese maple; another lightly recalls a teenage daughter’s failure to appreciate Shakespeare because he is insufficiently “original”; and still another discusses fruit flies as a model of stability and inurement to fortune: “They are the best, as pest invasions go: / no bites and no disease, just clouds of small / tan smudges spawned in week-old grapes.”

Juster thus shows a unified personality, but a staid one. His only indulgences are those we already knew: the ever-witty light verse that sends up Billy Collins and Bob Dylan and the occasional impatience with the drama queens of the poetic tradition. Only in the brief “An Apostle Falls” do we sense a poetic vision that looks beyond the humanism of bodily limits for some further horizon of value and drama, even as the cost of that vision proves mortal:

Betrayal had fulfilled the prophecy.
Too proud for penance and too weak to run,
he strung himself up from a cedar tree
and swayed for days beneath a scathing sun.
Thieves cut his desiccated body free,
then left it in the dust. Throughout that night,
Jerusalem kept shuddering with light.

Juster always writes well. His vision is humane. One senses that the whole tradition he first entered by way of translation becomes properly his in his original poems. The whole is a thing of beauty. And yet, before we can really say we’ve seen the whole of his “artistic personality,” I think we shall have to be given a poetry that takes us further into the mystery of a city “shuddering with light.” That will have to wait until after Petrarch.