Volume 24 117
desire. Sirr’s The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange,on
the other hand, contained one of the most powerful
erotic poems of the last twenty years, about desire’s
fulfillment. Here, the object of desire is—everything:
Not an expedition exactly, or a journey; say then a
walking out, a meandering, an inclination towards
dust
and bustle, a putting of ourselves among buildings
and
people, which is how we found ourselves in that
city,
walking along the narrow streets on a fair day,
admiring
the stalls, running our fingers along bright fabrics,
sniffing
cheeses, wandering wherever the crowd took us;
and half expecting to be blurted eventually into the
square, the columned hall, the wide theatre where
the
city is saved or the trial proves more complex than
had
been imagined and the day grows long, where
hucksters
come to show the latest miracle, and prophets
unload
their dark freight...
“Gospels”
Here the lyricism works just as well within the
prose technique; there is a tricky fusion of medita-
tion and material reminiscent of Seferis or Seifert.
The underlying implication is the solace that what
is fully realized—“The table, the chair, / look, are
utterly here”—is never entirely lost. There is a faith
in connection, both of language to the world
(“Sometimes you can say it and it stays”) and of
consciousness to existence. But all is water, as
Thales said, including us; and yet we can find a kind
of ecstasy in dissolution and merging; “as we ap-
proach each other / our bodies slip their ropes and
drift, / how lightly, without hesitation or inquiry, /
one steps into another, and stays there.” But it’s pro-
foundly disturbing. Hence Sirr says, humorously,
“Morning returns the world / We are gathered here
/ to refuse it.” Luckily, things know nothing of our
ideas, and “the fork in my hand, the glass at my lips
/ and the water in my mouth // have not learned si-
lence. / Their language is everywhere.”
Being is for tourists, becoming is for poets. Sirr
understands that experience is something one devours
and is devoured by—gladly, in his case, perhaps sadly
in Gioia’s. One can even marvel at the fading of one’s
own dust. Sirr echoes Whitman’s “I stop somewhere,
waiting for you” in the beautiful “Song”:
Look for me
in the galaxy of stone,
in the ashes of the sun,in the stubborn notes
of the servant’s song
as she works through the night,
her voice filling
the empty rooms;
in the charity of the moon
above this town,
distinguishing equally
the assassin’s knife,
the solitary life;
in all
that is pitiless and beautiful;
where earth meets water and water meets light.
Source:Bruce F. Murphy, Review of Interrogations at Noon,
in Poetry, Vol. 179, No. 5, February 2002, pp. 238–49.Ned Balbo
In the following review, Balbo calls the poems
in Interrogations at Noon“superb in their blend of
toughness and vulnerability, their quest for solace
before loss.”Tireless essayist, librettist, and anthologist,
Gioia is a poet first and foremost, as his third col-
lection decisively confirms. A master of subtle reg-
isters, elegiac in his outlook, Gioia is more likely to
lower his voice than shout, as when a husband, his
wife in the shower, calls himself “the missing man... surrounded by the flesh and furniture of home”
(“The Voyeur”). Gioia sees the metaphors we live
with every day: in “New Year’s,” for example, “A
field of snow without a single footprint” suggests our
need to look toward an always unfolding future,
while “Words” weighs the admission that “The world
does not need words” against the recognition that “To
name is to know and remember.” Gioia includes two
poems freely adapted from Seneca, “Descent to the
Underworld” and “Juno Plots Her Revenge”; both al-
low him to speak with impressive gravity and range
about what lies at the dark heart of human affairs.
Gioia can lighten a dark moment or finely shade
a lighter one, as in “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as
Refrain.” With its arresting refrains and effortless syn-
tax, the poem is a tour de force, a lively whirl among
eccentrics; still, it remains, at bottom, a catalogue of
loss, of bluster in the face of death, among minds
petty, brilliant, frail: “Breton considered suicide the
truest art, / though life seemed hardly worth the trou-
ble to discard.” “Words for Music,” a separate sec-
tion, takes a lighter touch, though here, too, death is
present: the vampire Nosferatu’s dactylic “Serenade,”
for example, summons us to an eternal idyll.
(Nosferatu,Gioia’s complete libretto, is also currently
out from Graywolf.) Finally, “My Dead Lover” is a
moving tribute to a loss, its anguish understated yet
The Litany