Donald Justice’s poems have been greatly admired by his fellow writers on both sides of the Atlantic. He was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems and in 1991 the Bollingen Prize in Poetry.

Orpheus Hesitated Beside the Black River is the poet’s own choice of his poems, made specially with an eye to his readership outside the USA. It adds some uncollected and recent poems to the very best of a lifetime’s commitment to imaginative art.