99 Poems: New and Selected by Dana Gioia (review)

In recent years, Dana Gioia has emerged as the de facto Dean of Catholic American writers. His career as a poet has spanned nearly four decades, including a notable stint in Washington, DC. As chair of the NEA from 2003 to 2009, Gioia labored tirelessly as a champion of literacy and the arts, even as he continued his more private work as a poet, editor, librettist, and critic. Many readers of this journal will be familiar with his provocative 2013 piece in First Things, “The Catholic Writer Today,” which catalogued the great American and British Catholics whose influence in arts and letters was evident until recent decades.

In 2016, Gioia published his latest volume of poems, 99 Poems: New and Selected. In this fifth collection, Gioia brings together for the first time both new and previously published works, casting 84 already familiar poems alongside 15 new lyrics. An unapologetic Roman Catholic, Gioia does not shy away from religious or theological themes in these poems, but it is not only the content of these lyrics that marks him as a writer of faith. More significantly, it is Gioia’s commitment that to the meaningfulness of the world—an insistence that all of Creation matters—that sets him apart as a Christian poet.

99 Poems is divided into seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The heptadic structure of the collection aligns it with, among other possibilities, scripture’s Creation account. In fact, readers will detect other overtones from Genesis; for instance, the book’s initial poem, “The Burning Ladder,” is a reimagining of Jacob’s dream of the ladder joining heaven and earth, linking Creation and its Creator. That initial poem closes by likening the patriarch to

  a stoneupon a stone pillow,shivering. Gravityalways greater than desire.

In those final words, Gioia sets the stage and identifies one of the volume's recurring themes: those drawn to the goodness of the world must guard against the temptation to close their eyes to its Maker.

The first of the book’s seven sections and the poems included therein can be read as an extended meditation on the difficulty of achieving a balance between doing justice to the immanent, material world and to its transcendent, spiritual source. In naming this opening section “Mystery,” Gioia chooses as his starting point that which can elicit wonder that would ultimately blossom into wisdom. The final section of 99 Poems, serving as the counterpoint to “Mystery,” contains poems devoted to the experience of human desire, comprised within a set that Gioia groups together under the designation “Love.” As love is the hoped-for culmination, the final perfection, of all things, so is it the completion of 99 Poems. Running through the intervening five sections (Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs) is a traceable thread, weaving the poems together into a subtle but recognizable unity. Within each section, poems taken from earlier collections (the “Selected” poems of the volume’s title) are arranged chronologically, from Daily Horoscope (1986) to Pity the Beautiful (2012). The 15 titular “New” poems are found at the close of each section.

Another important theme in 99 Poems, and one that is related to its religio-theological bent, is the complicated relationship between existence and language. In both the new and the selected earlier works, Gioia’s sensitivity to this relationship is evident as a persistent issue throughout his career. In the new poem “Marriage of Many Years,” the final work in the book, Gioia opens with a straightforward statement regarding the need for poetic humility. He writes, “Most of what happens happens beyond words.” Here the poet, the man of words, momentarily undercuts any suspicion of poetic hubris, potentially disabusing himself (and all poets, for that matter) of the temptation to believe that words could supersede or constitute reality. They cannot. Nor can they function as ends in themselves. Instead, as Gioia would have it, they are means to an even...