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Dana Gioia Dana Gioia received his B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford University. He also completed an M.A. at Harvard where he studied with poets Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. Gioia is the author of Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture as well as two other collections of poetry, The Gods of Winter and Daily Horoscope and Nosferatu, a libretto. He lives in Santa Rosa, California.
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Interrogations at Noon Dana Gioia, an internationally known poet and critic, is notably prolific with his essays, reviews, translations, and anthologies. But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active twenty-five-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style. This new collection displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility-from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry-time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart-Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends. "Gioia's rhymes are true, his meters are correct and musical, his diction is fresh-he is well on the way to becoming a classic poet himself." -Ray Olson, Booklist "[This book] is unlike anything produced by anyone else in America. Sicilian, Mexican and Native American in his ancestry, Gioia writes out of a 'dark' Catholic Sensibility-a sensibility which sees 'the end of the world' in every sensuous detail around him....Interrogations at Noon is a book about risk, sacrifice, loss, and the limited triumph of words. What does it tell us about the way we are living here, now, in America? 'Comfort me with stones. Quench my thirst with sand./I offer you this scarred and guilty hand/Until others mix our ashes.' ('Pentecost') Or, more quietly, in the beautiful concluding poem of the book: 'What we conceal/Is always more than what we dare confide./Think of the letters that we write our dead.' ('Unsaid') It is not joy but 'the tears of things,' 'lacrimae rerum,' that this utterly compelling book deals with. It is the year 2001, and there is much to weep for." -Jack Foley, The Alsop Review "Interrogations at Noon is achingly good....[Gioia] knows that we are born into a world of grief and death, but that life is still a feast to be devoured-even while the skeleton at the table cracks his knuckles, two seats down. Gioia's poems celebrate love and sex even as they accept death and loss....This is not academic poetry but public verse. Gioia's life work as a critic has been to make poetry popular again, to promote the best poetry he can find, and to make it accessible to anyone who loves the music of words. At the same time, Gioia has not been afraid to knock certain prima donnas of 'the Po' Biz' off their undeserved pedestals....Gioia is as much a creator of fine poetry as he is a critic of it. Don't take my word for it: Read the book." -Susan Balée, The Philadelphia Inquirer Graywolf Press |
