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. 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
2402 University Ave., Suite 203
Saint Paul, MN 55114-1701