Poetry for Students

116 Poetry for Students

words forming pictures more than images. But

these are pictures that ought not to be forgotten.

Burleson reminds us that most of the world goes to

sleep worrying not if tomorrow will bring greater

happiness, success, and ego satisfaction, but

whether they will wake up at all. Whether they too

will be swept over the falls by history:

a pile of machetes and hoes

higher than your head most bloodstained

and every thirty seconds or so

another body pounds

down Rusumo Falls in the pool

at the bottom they bob

back and forth so

bloated and gray

you might think

massacre had created

a new race

“At the Border”

Though this ironic voice, the phrasing, and the

arrangement on the page seem learned from Zbig-

niew Herbert’s Report from the Besieged City,

Burleson has poured his own powerful memories

into the mold.

In terms of lyricism, Dana Gioia is a virtuoso, it

seems. Tones are augmented or diminished with great

care. The poems are lyrical, fluid, assured; this is a

poetry free of mistakes (though that is not the same

as perfection). “Words” is an ars poetica of sorts:

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the

path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and

uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure

being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were

spoken.

There’s more to Gioia’s revival of formalism

than meets the eye, or ear; here he embraces not

only traditional measures, but traditional philoso-

phy. The world exists independently of our think-

ing/speaking about it, and so the role of language

is mimetic, not constitutive. Gioia also hints at the

moral dimension of poetry in the title poem:

Just before noon I often hear a voice,

Cool and insistent, whispering in my head.

It is the better man I might have been,

Who chronicles the life I’ve never led.

“Interrogations at Noon”

Throughout this book, there is a sense of con-

science, of being held to account. Behind its sur-

face brilliance and the sometimes casual,

occasional subjects, it is a very somber book. There

are depths of sorrow that are refracted through

form, and sometimes fully unveiled, as in “Pente-

cost, after the death of our son”:

We are not as we were. Death has been our pente-

cost,

And our innocence consumed by these implacable

Tongues of fire.

Comfort me with stones. Quench my thirst with

sand.

I offer you this scarred and guilty hand

Until others mix our ashes.

Gioia’s is a public poetry that retains a sense

of privacy, and a feeling for the limits of language.

As he says in “Corner Table,” “what matters most

/ Most often can’t be said.” The theme is repeated

in “Unsaid,” which is preoccupied with and per-

haps justifying this holding back; that it is the

final poem in the book underscores the point that

“So much of what we live goes on inside—/ The

diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches / Of unac-

knowledged love are no less real / For having

passed unsaid.” This bottled-up suffering, when it

finds an opening, comes out in a fierce jet. Death

is everywhere present, as a desire for release from

the unendurable. Hence the evocation of “The End

of the World,” the “Song for the End of Time,” and

the dark prayer of “Litany”:

This is a litany to earth and ashes,

to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,

to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,

settling indifferently on books and beds.

This is a prayer to praise what we become,

“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”

Savor its taste—the bitterness of earth and ashes.

This is an eerie picture of a depopulated world,

after the end of time—the eternal silence in which

nothing happens but the accumulation of dust.

Peter Sirr shares Gioia’s fluency and passion,

but it is for a world of vivid colors and rooms not

vacant but stuffed to bursting. It is the lyricism of

life rather than of the afterlife. A Dubliner, Sirr has

a Joycean sense of the city’s quotidian majesty:

At night I open the cupboard:

voices and stones arrive

fruit and fish from the market

a hand whisking tobacco

from an inside pocket

the floating

greened copper of a dome

ingredients for The City

which is not the city

but the grocery of an eye.

“Domes of the City”

Many poets seem to shy away from the treach-

erous territory of enthusiasm. This is why the poem

about desire is often about the disappointment of

The Litany