Dana Gioia Knihy

"Highly enjoyable . . .  Studying with Miss Bishop  offers the opportunity to encounter writing as an act of civility."― Wall Street Journal"Fascinating snapshots of remarkable encounters which, when brought together, chart a delightfully unusual path to literary success."― Booklist"Reading this memoir is like being at one of those memorable dinner parties, attended by the best and brightest, sparkling with wit and excellent conversations. You don’t want it to be over, the conversations to end! But with books, you need not worry. You can go back to the party, savor it, reread it again, and again."—Julia Alvarez, author of  In the Time of the Butterflies  and  AfterlifeIn  Studying with Miss Bishop , Dana Gioia discusses six people who helped him become a writer and better understand what it meant to dedicate one’s life to writing. Four were famous authors—Elizabeth Bishop, John Cheever, James Dickey, and Robert Fitzgerald. Two were unknown—Gioia’s Merchant Marine uncle and Ronald Perry, a forgotten poet. Each of the six essays provides a vivid portrait; taken together they tell the story of Gioia’s own journey from working-class LA to international literary success.

Written with the student in mind, this text includes an impressive collection of both traditional and contemporary poems representing a cultural diversity of authors and a richness in the range of style. To frame the selections, the text presents helpful apparatus and extensive material on writing about literature 66 new poems and 17 new works of critical prose have been added to this new edition, along with 6 student sample essays, and new Writing Critically sections at the end of the chapters.

Now in paperback, a major career retrospective by the California Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia So much of what we live goes on inside— The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches Of unacknowledged love are no less real For having passed unsaid. What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead. —from “Unsaid” Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.

Winner of the American Book AwardDana Gioia, an internationally known poet and critic, is notably prolific with his essays, reviews, translations, and anthologies. But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.

A wondrous new collection by Dana Gioia, “one of America’s premier poets and critics” (Julia Alvarez). Dana Gioia has been hailed for decades as a master of traditional lyric forms, whose expansive and accessible poems are offerings of rare poignancy and insight. In Meet Me at the Lighthouse, he invites us back to old Los Angeles, where the shabby nightclub of the title beckons us into its noirish immortality. Elsewhere, he laments the once-vibrant neighborhood where he grew up, now bulldozed, and recalls his working-class family of immigrants. Gioia describes a haunting from his mother on his birthday, Christmas Eve. Another poem remembers his uncle, a US Merchant Marine. And “The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz” tells the story of his great-grandfather, a Mexican vaquero who was shot dead at a tavern in Wyoming during a dispute over a bar tab. “I praise my ancestors, the unkillable poor,” Gioia writes. This book is dedicated to their memory. Including poems, song lyrics, translations, and concluding with an unsettling train ride to the underworld, Meet Me at the Lighthouse is a luminous exploration of nostalgia, mortality, and what makes a life worth living and remembering.