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Acumen
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Review The
First Shall Be Last Interrogations at Noon by Dana Gioia. Graywolf Press, 2402 University Avenue, Suite 203, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55114, U.S.A. 76pp.; $16.00. In Dana Gioia's work spiritual generosity exists side by side with a melancholia (perhaps the melancholia of doubt, such as the Elizabethan poets began to suffer from with the retreat of the faith of the Middle Ages?). But it is an exquisite combination that makes him probably the most exquisite poet writing today in English. Couple this with an unerring sense of form covering the full spectrum from the most formal to freer verse, and one has elegance of writing too. When I use terms like 'exquisite' and 'elegance' of this poet I mean the very opposite of precious; rather I intend something much closer to the quality of Pater's "hard, gemlike flame", but without any euphuistic properties. There is nothing vulgar in this poet either, and there is no other poet today of whom I can so emphatically say that. It gives Gioia that rarest of all qualities - both in his prose and in his poetry - namely, authority. If I had one wish today for poetry it would be that, in terms of language (not subject matter) it would escape the contemporary. By this I mean that more poets would employ not just the present conversational or the high academic in their work, but all of that poetic language built up from Chaucer to Whitman, Milton to Auden — picking and choosing the best syntactical and verbal felicities— and employ it in their own ways. Dana Gioia does. Gioia's authority derives from humility, perhaps a troubled humility, but humility all the same. And the real subtle truths, nay truth itself, will only reveal themselves/itself, as Hugh MacDiarmid — a far from humble man — once said "through a proper attitude of humility". The opening poem of Interrogations at Noon sets the tone of humility by beginning in arrogance with the assertion, "The world does not need words" — a richly ironic statement coming from a poet! But look more closely at this poem, called simply 'Words', and see how words do come gradually to matter:
By subtlety of poetic argument and insight, words do count:
I have quoted a good deal of this poem to illustrate tile decline from the high but negative arrogance of the first line to the low but positive humility and truth of the final two lines. A truly marvellous poem. It is the same with the title-poem 'Interrogations at Noon', with its almost savage self-deprecation of the "cool and insistent" voice "in my head", telling the poet:
This is poetry expressing not so much the sense of failure, as one leading to humility. Which, in turn, leads to the wisdom of the third poem in this fine first section of the book:
Finally, in the fourth poem of the first section, we have the reminder of why we need this proper attitude on the part of the poet, which MacDiarmid called "humility" and Keats' "negative capability":
Significantly, the poem is called 'Divination'. Later in the book, in a wonderful poem of refined irony and humour called 'The Archbishop', which is dedicated to "a famous critic" (one wonders whom?) the same point about the miraculous understanding, the poetry, which alone can now from humility, is returned to yet again:
But Interrogations at Noon is a more varied volume than my remarks may have so far suggested. l"here is, for example, a longish poem called 'Juno Plots Her Revenge', based on the opening speech of Seneca's Hercules Furens which is excellently modernised, but without being clever-clever or mannered, as Christopher Logue's Kings tends to be at times. Then there are more personal poems like 'Corner Table' or 'My Dead Lover', where understatement combines with elegance to give even the anecdotal that exquisite sense I referred to earlier. Sometimes Gioia's penchant for nostalgia cannot be properly overcome; sometimes it can be brilliantly 'turned', for example, with the single word "concertize" in these lines from 'The Lost Garden':
Gioia is never costive for a poet who "is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems". Just occasionally, as in 'Borrowed Tunes', his ear lets him down, and there are signs of overworking in some of the pieces. But it is rare in this otherwise fine book of poems which, as I say, is something of a relief to encounter in a world where the rough, the vulgar and, very often, the pointless, predominate. A world which has quite forgotten Ronald Tamplin's words, "Poetry is a type of alternative speech, not an imitation of everyday speech", or Thomas Gray's, "The language of the age is never the language of poetry". Personally, I can take any amount of realism (or romanticism) or whatever in poetry; but I resist anything once it becomes a convention. But nothing is a convention in these poems, despite all the fuss and false-prejudice and mis-expectations which have been created by associating Dana Gioia's work with 'New Formalism'. His is simply good, beautifully-crafted poetry, written from within the timeless tradition set up by the best English language poets of the past. — WILLIAM OXLEY |
