(page 4)

            At this late stage, I should apologize for giving the impression that this book is exclusively arduous, dark, or weighty.  Interrogations at Noon contains an equal balance of lyrical levity, wit, and “the cool subtraction of desire,” as Gioia writes in the next-to-last poem, “The Lost Garden,” of the mature contentment that comes with “wanting nothing more than what has been.”

            In an earlier section, the “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain” is a crazyquilt of biographical fragments from the French Dadaist era of art.  The note tells us, “All of the incidents and quotations in the poem are true.”  So, in this scattershot romp through suicidal love and worship of the absurd, we learn, “Dali dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl —,” and “Wounded Apollinaire wore a small steel plate/ inserted in his skull.  ‘I so loved art,’ he smiled,/ ‘I joined the artillery.’”  My favorite:  “Wealthy Roussel taught his poodle to smoke a pipe./ ‘When I write, I am surrounded by radiance./ My glory is like a great bomb waiting to explode.’” 

            Section III, subtitled, “Music for Words,” has many treats.  Gioia is an opera librettist (no wonder he hears voices!), and he has included here “Three Songs from Nosferatu,” an opera he has been working on with the composer, Alva Henderson.   These lyrics are a voluptuous fusion of melancholy and romance.  They unite pleasure and pain with a festering tenderness, just right for the high-gothic melodrama of vampire lore.    

            “Alley Cat Love Song” follows with playful wit, and a nod to T.S. Eliot.  But Old  Possum isn’t quite in the same vein of seductive, suburban hilarity as, “Come into the garden, Fred,/ For the neighborhood tabby is gone./ Come into the garden, Fred./ I’ve nothing but my flea collar on,/ And the scent of catnip has gone to my head./ I’ll wait by the screen door till dawn.”

            “At the Waterfront Café” could almost be the satirical counterpart of “A California Requiem.”  Here are the living hedonists, blithely consuming the planet’s resources with their riches.  They are contrasted in alternating stanzas with those who serve them.  The poet watches in mild derision as the wealthy patrons depart.  Still, he neither condemns their showy affluence, nor divests himself of the shares he holds in their world: 

...tonight I hope they prosper.
Are they shallow?  I don’t care.
Jealousy is all too common,
Style and beauty much too rare.

            The last section offers reflective serenades to lost love.  These poems, some in free, some in metrical verse, are concerned with the superiority of touch over the inadequacy of words, circling back to the first poem in the book, “Words,” which begins, “The world does not need words,” and goes on to assert, “The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.”  “But words are never as precise as touch,” we are told in “Long Distance.”  In “Corner Table,” a relationship comes to an end when one of the lovers announces her intention to marry someone else.  “What matters most/ Most often can’t be said”... “We understand/ This last mute touch that lingers is farewell.”  In “The Bargain,” the poet reflects, “I had forgotten the sharp/ exactitude of touch...” 

            Again, these poems have the edginess of Weldon Kees without the bitterness; and, the slight discomfort of their confessional intimacy is appealing, unlike the disturbing self-defeat of “Interrogations at Noon.”  Gioia articulates the distance of time that shades old, quiet romantic yearnings.   In the soul-bearing unhinderedness he allows himself, he unaffectedly seems to come to terms with his own history of desire, and the futility of questioning the choices it has lead him to — most particularly with the last lines of “Summer Storm:”

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.  

            Through richly interpretive translations, Interrogations at Noon also pays homage to Cavafy, Seneca, Rilke, and the modern Italian poet, Valerio Magrelli.  The book ends with the six-line poem, “Unsaid.”  “So much of what we live goes on inside,” it begins.  Five lines later, “inside” is end-rhymed with “confide.”  “Inside/...confide.”  That is what poets do.  Dana Gioia does it with a style and beauty that is much too rare.