Juster's 10th collection offers verse in a range of registers, subjects, and styles—from pathos to humor, from doctor's waiting room to the natural world, and from free verse to sonnets.
'No' is Juster at his most dogmatic. His 'message' is more often oblique, with any tendency to 'wrath' dissolving in oracular language and vague presentiments. Or not so vague ... A more characteristic mood is set by 'Cassandra,' a well-turned sonnet in which the prophetess says, in the final line, 'a blade is always being honed for me' ... As the pages go by, the conjoining of wrath and wonder in Juster’s book title starts to feel earned ... The poems of...Juster, though plenty introspective, avoid self-indulgence at all costs. One cost or sacrifice, it has to be said, is a more daring vocabulary, which might have relieved a general flatness of diction.
... a collection that both marvels at and rails against human frailty, against the backdrop of a fallen universe. The book’s seriousness lies in its sustained resistance to the easy way out: either to reject or embrace, without caveat, a cosmos that consists, in equal measures, of miracle and outrage ... tensions resonate at the level of poetic form, an inextricable element in the thought processes of Juster’s work. His mastery of traditional forms showcases itself in Wonder and Wrath, with a range that includes the sonnet, the pantoum, the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tetrameter line, and a blank verse so tightly modulated that any metrical shift or substitution calls attention to itself like a detour sign ... As the culminating poems in a work of 'serious' poetry...parodies hold together in themselves the book’s concerns: the uncertainty of the material world, the simultaneous failures and potentialities of language to mediate and order that world, and the strange, divided, sometimes hostile country that is the self. If the mind behind Wonder and Wrath is laughing, often enough it laughs to keep from breaking something.
Juster regards the common and the sacred in the everyday ... A wry humor ... Sections titled 'Outer,' 'Inner,' and 'Other' form a cohesive triptych that anchors this strong collection, which includes Juster’s skilled translations of poems by Li Po and Rimbaud, and a take on a Bob Dylan classic that is very funny and not to be missed.
