Since the publication of his first volume of poetry in 1976, David St. John has emerged as a significant voice in modern American letters. Hush, his debut work, contains a series of long poems which, according to Ira Sadoff in the Antioch Review, "reveal obliquely the poet's concerns with the physical world, with loss, with aloneness." Sadoff compared St. John's poetry to "carefully woven tapestries, full of complication and illustration, interruption and statement." William Cole, writing in the Saturday Review, cited Hush's "The Empty Dance Hall" in particular, lauding its "many fine images." New York Times Book Review critic Gilbert Sorrentino complained of "too much rhetoric, too much of the glamour of sadness," but admitted that St. John's poetry in Hush "is invention, skilled and careful."

When St. John's second volume, The Shore, saw print in 1980, it met with further accolades. Washington Post Book World reviewer Stanley Plumley hailed it as "an enormous esthetic and emotional step beyond ... Hush," and called St. John's poetic gift "genius." Plumley singled out for attention individual poems such as "Hotel Sierra," "Until the Sea Is Dead," and the title work. In his New York Times Book Review assessment, Charles Molesworth was not as complimentary, however, commenting that in The Shore St. John's work "threatens often to cave into a nostalgia from which it might never recover," while conceding that "genuine beauty" can be found in St. John's descriptive poetry. A Publishers Weekly critic praised The Shore's "lyrical intensity" and "graceful poems."

No Heaven, St. John's third collection of verse, was published in 1985. Like much of his work, it is concerned with relationships: in one poem a woman fires shots from a gun to get attention from a lover; in another, a man in London first encounters punk girls before making a disturbing visit to an exotic club. New York Times Book Review contributor Peter Stitt specifically lauded "A Hard & Noble Patience" from the book as an example of what he termed St. John's "almost clinically psychological poems about alienation" that are "sometimes funny, sometimes chilling, and sometimes both."

For his fourth book-length effort, Terraces of Rain, St. John chose Italy as the unifying theme. The collection features Italian poetic forms, including terza rima and the villanelle. Diann Blakely Shoaf, reviewing Terraces of Rain in the Southern Humanities Review, particularly enjoyed "The Bells of Santa Maria in Trastevere," "Ostia," and "To Pasolini." She also called St. John's work "cinematic," noting "intriguing shifts and jump-cuts." The critic concluded that Terraces of Rain is "a vintage collection by a poet from whom we have come to expect much."

In St. John's The Red Leaves of Night, the poems are bound together by the topics of sex that has just occurred, affairs that never were but could have been, and the poet's conviction that "passionate lovemaking is the finest possible experience," observed Ray Olson in Booklist. St. John's poems in the book display a "melancholic wisdom" that "seems hard-won" in the presence of "love lost daily and sex cheapened by night," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. "Red Wheat: Montana" recognizes the profundity of weeping and silence, while a lover is dismissed abruptly and with confidence in "Patience." St. John resurrects an iconic sex symbol, Elvis Presley, to comic effect in "Memphis." "Music" becomes the poem's narrator's passion, the language he uses to explain his everyday life and the largest concepts he imagines. Though many of the poems are infused with the sadness that occurs when the affair ends, St. John retains his commitment to the individually liberating power of sex. Olson commended The Red Leaves of Night for its "glamorous poems ... full of sensuous imagery." The Publishers Weekly critic felt that the collection "solidifies [St. John's] growing reputation," adding that the poet "becomes, more than before, the wandering, soulful troubadour of whom he writes."

The Face: A Novella in Verse consists of forty-five poems, some previously published, that in total tell a loosely constructed story through the intense imagery of St. John's poetry. Library Journal reviewer Fred Muratori described the book as "less a narrative than a phantasmagoric dream diary or extended dramatic monolog." James S. Torrenz, writing in America, noted that "what ties the poems together are recurrent phrases and motifs, a color code and at least one offbeat element of story." The plot of the assemblage revolves around the protagonist, a faded Hollywood star, and the attempt to make a biographical movie about his life. Images of masks and faces reoccur in the poems, suggesting the discarding and assumption of identity, the mask of Hollywood behind which the protagonist lived so long, and the constructing of self from many different fragments. For the narrator, the face itself is the ultimate mask, hiding the spirit, the identity, the self behind a mask constructed of familiar flesh. For a former Hollywood star who once relied on his looks as his most significant and sellable feature, the gradual aging and fading of the face is the unwilling donning of a new identity inextricably linked to the old. The protagonist spends time in many of the poems assembling and disassembling, taking off and putting on masks, looking for his identity within a fractured lifetime. As the story progresses, the narrator grouses about the poor scripting by Infanta, who is making the film; feels contempt for the trendy young cinematographer; and despairs that the movie will never be completed. When the film premieres, the narrator is unable to take it; he gets physically ill and bolts from the theater. Looking upward, he sees a cloud-mask of his own face assemble, perhaps triumphantly, perhaps mockingly, in the sky. "St. John has written an extremely beautiful book that brings us to the edge of beauty and beauty's possibility," commented Maureen N. McLane in the Harvard Review.

In an interview with noted musician and songwriter Jackson Browne in Interview magazine, St. John mused on the personal and intimate nature of his poems. "A poem or a song that's really personal and intimate makes our own world larger because we then have that other person's experience as part of our own," he remarked to Browne. "The universal is made up of a whole lot of little particulars, of everybody's sensibilities that get drawn together. The poems and stories and people who try to make large statements end up speaking for nobody, and the people who speak for themselves speak for a lot of people."

St. John told another interviewer, Charles Harper Webb of the online Cortland Review: "I really have tried to meld together a sense of something that sometimes seems out of this time with something, some detail that's contemporary so that there's this kind of double vision. ... I've always been obsessed in the poems with how men and women engage with each other socially, sexually, psychologically. That's really the terrain I find most compelling." He concluded, "I want the poems to open up a sense of possibility to people."

St. John once told Contemporary Authors: "I sometimes think of myself as a late-nineteenth century French poet, somehow lost in time. The music of language—which is also the music of intelligence—remains for me the most urgent consideration in any poem."

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