The American Century: Literature since 1945 629Liethauser, as “ ‘Rabbits: A Valentine” illustrates, is deeply interested in the shifting,
often elusive series of connections that exist between the natural environment and
our psychic landscapes, between where we are and who we are. The signature poem
from his first collection, “Hundreds of Fireflies,” for instance, begins as a formally
elaborate but apparently simple portrait of fireflies on a summer evening. “The night
belongs / to them,” we are told. “Darkness brightens them.” However, with the
entrance into the poem of the poet and another human presence (a presence who is,
quite probably, the poet’s wife, Mary Jo Salter), the perspective and tonal value subtly
shift. “So it’s as wooers they come / bumbling the cottage screens /,” the poet reflects,
“to illuminate palely, eerily / our faces.” The illumination is both literal and
metaphorical, since the fireflies seem to light up the relationship of the human
presences that observe them and wonder at their graceful brilliance. With the
prospect of “lengthening fall night” and “a year / of city living” under “skies grayly
gathering snow,” the poet and his companion are, in a sense, harvesting a potential
recollection, something to warm them and their relationship against the cold to
come. They will be taking the memory of their firefly summer evening, and the
promise of other, similar evenings in later summers, back with them to the slate gray
skies and “the murk of shopping plazas.” The memory and the promise are like
buried treasure, a shared emotional resource as well as a source of hope and
inspiration. Like so many of Leithauser’s poems, including “Rabbits: A Valentine,”
“Hundreds of Fireflies” formally reflects its subject in its mood, motions, and
measure. Like so many of them, it also reflects on that subject, allowing us to discover
the elaborate pattern of interaction and interdependence existing between the
natural and the human: two worlds that are utterly separate, distinct yet intimately,
passionately connected.
Gioia is equally eclectic in his choice of poetic forms. His first collection, Daily
Horoscope (1986), includes traditional and free verse. There are lyrics, meditations
and longer narratives, personal poems and poems that draw on or attend to myth,
history, and art. The Gods of Winter (1991), his second collection, is a darker, more
somber book. It includes poems that engage with Gioia’s tragic loss of an infant son,
as well as two long dramatic monologues, “The Homecoming,” in which the narrator
explains his reasons for and the consequences of his committing murder, and
“Counting the Children,” which deals with a strange encounter between an
accountant and a grotesque doll collection. But it is similarly wide ranging in formal
terms, as is his third collection, Interrogations at Noon (2001), which includes verse
translations of contemporary and classical poets along with original works. The
titles of all three of these collections allude to time and its passing, which is an
almost obsessive theme in Gioia’s work. “Things ripen or go dry,” the poet observes
in “Do Not Expect”; while in “Guide to the Other Gallery” a guided tour of a strange
gallery packed with signs and symptoms of failure, emptiness and decay (a “hall of
broken limbs,” “portraits ... of the unknown,” “shelves of unread books,” “rows of
bottles with nothing inside”) ends with a chilling memento mori. “Look at that case
of antique wood /,” the poet-guide advises his guest the reader, “Without a label.
It’s for you.” Death and oblivion, signaled by an unlabeled coffin, wait at the end ofGGray_c05.indd 629ray_c 05 .indd 629 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM