Interrogations At Noon

Publishers Weekly,Gioia gained prominence during the 1980s as a crusader on behalf of the New Formalists���poets who wrote about everyday lives and losses in determinedly accessible, traditional modes and metres. Though his own poetry has received respectful notices, he has gained wider acclaim as a critic and editor, especially for the polemical volume Can Poetry Matter? This third book of poems (his first since 1991) will disappoint some readers, please others and surprise very few. Much of the work here expresses predictable sentiments in predictably straightforward lines���"The daylight needs no praise and so we praise it always," notes the speaker of "Words"; a husband, imagining himself as "The Voyeur," "looks and aches not only for her touch/ but for the secret that her presence brings"; a poem called "My Dead Lover" tells him or her, "Your body was the first I ever knew/ Better than my own." Domestic happiness and everyday epiphanies have produced many good poems, in and out of traditional metres, but Gioia fails to make them linguistically or emotionally compelling in any way. His real gift is for light verse; "Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain" has a seriocomic interest beyond its absurdly reduced subjects (Andre Breton, Apollinaire and others), and the songs from Gioia's libretto Nosferatu stand out for their verve. Translations from Seneca's tragedy Hercules Furens and from the Italian poet Valerio Magrelli flesh out what would otherwise be an extremely thin volume. (Apr.) Forecast: Gioia's prolific critical activity in myriad venues has kept his brand ID solid, even after the collapse of the New Formalism. Followers of little and larger poetry magazines will buy this book just to see what Gioia's up to; libraries and others will similarly get it for the name recognition. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved