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            Gioia takes great risks with these poems about the never-ending aftermath of loss.  He succeeds because the poems are genuine.  Their dedication to personal grief is universalized and elevated by scriptural and allegorical allusion.  Fragile and pure, they are small, beautiful monuments to soul-searching heartache.

            This section closes with two of the strongest poems in the book.   “A California Requiem” harks back to two poems from Gioia’s first book, Daily Horoscope: “California Hills in August,” his most widely anthologized poem, and “In Chandler Country,” both instant hits upon their appearance in The New Yorker, sometime in the mid-Eighties.   “A California Requiem,” in keeping with “Interrogations at Noon,” opens its iambic pentameter quatrains in a cemetery, amid graves “New planted in the irrigated lawn,” as the “...square, trim headstones quietly declared/ The impotence of grief against the sun.”  Walking through the manicured landscape, the poet waxes elegiac, in a stanza that signals the enduring greatness to which this poem is surely destined:

My blessed California, you are so wise.
You render death abstract, efficient, clean.
Your afterlife is only real estate,
And in his kingdom, Death must stay unseen.

            Soon, the poet (as he is prone to do) hears a voice.   It is the beseeching chorus of the dead, calling from a brand-new circle of the Inferno.  “Stay a moment longer, quiet stranger./ Your footsteps woke us from our lidded cells./ Now hear us whisper in the scorching wind,/ Our single voice drawn from a thousand hells.”  They agonize under the burden of the destructive past in which they hedonistically participated, hastening the ruin of the beloved places that were so generously good to them.  “We lived in places that we never knew./ We could not name the birds perched on our sill,/ Or see the trees we cut down for our view./ What we possessed we always chose to kill.”  The poet realizes he will not resist, when he is appointed to “Become the voice of our forgotten places./ Teach us the names of what we have destroyed./ We are like the shadows the bright noon erases,/ Weightlessly shrinking, bleached into the void.”  Once again, noon dazzles mercilessly; the landscape, both interior and exterior, is a wasteland; and the poet is the hero who always fails.  The poem ends in one of the most memorable and quotable stanzas we’re likely to see in a very long time:

“We offer you the landscape of your birth —
Exquisite and despoiled.  We all share blame.
We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth
For killing what we cannot even name.”

The words, “Exquisite and despoiled” immediately suggest the Robinson Jeffers title, “Shine, Perishing Republic.”  There is, to be sure, one vast difference between these two poets.  Jeffers shows no human sympathy; he instructs his children:  “And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man.”   While Gioia’s sensibility bows to compassion.  The voices of the guilt-ridden dead tell him, “We are your people, though you would deny it.”   He never does.

            “The End of the World” is an ominous title, and, by now, we might expect eschatology.   But we are surprized.  The poem begins almost merrily: “ ‘We’re going,” they said, ‘to the end of the world.’”  What follows is a literal excursion by car, on foot, over bridge and gravel, tracking a river to its spectacular waterfall.  The stanzas are energetic, metrical quatrains with couplet rhymes that fall into the regular rhythm of hiking.  This poem is both simple and lush.  Its landscape is no wasteland:  There are ospreys and green mountains and oak trees by the shore.  The journey to view the void is conducted by “guides” who have the anonymity of angels.  Their traveller is unafraid and accompanies them willingly.  At a certain point along the way, “My guides moved back.  I stood alone,/ As the current streaked over smooth flat stone.// Shelf by stone shelf the river fell./ The white water goosetailed with eddying swell./ Faster and louder the current dropped/ Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.”  The literal trek along the river may be interpreted symbolically after all:  It is a metaphysical idealization of death, awesome and serene.  The beauty of the forest behind him, his trail spent, the traveller is left alone to face eternity:

I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,
My journey done where the world ended.
I looked downstream.  There was nothing but sky,
The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

Who hasn’t tried to imagine with his senses what eternity is?  It can be a rapturous meditation.  Yeats found the unforgettably beautiful words to describe it, when he wrote of the sound of lake water, “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”  In “The End of the World,” Gioia, too, emerges with a rare and enchanting gem.