Interrogations at noon : poems / by Dana Gioia

Words -- The voyeur -- Interrogations at noon -- Failure -- Divination -- Elegy with surrealist proverbs as refrain -- The litany -- Entrance (Rilke) -- New Year's -- Metamorphosis -- Pentecost -- After a line by Cavafy -- A California requiem -- Descent to the underworld (Seneca) -- The end of the world -- Song for the end of time -- The Archbishop -- Three songs from Nosferatu: Ellen's dream ; Nosferatu's seranade ; Mad song -- Borrowed tunes: Alley cat love song ; The beggar's nightmare -- At the waterfront cafe -- Curriculum vitae -- Juno plots her revenge (Seneca) -- Corner table -- Long distance -- My dead lover -- Homage to Valerio Magrelli -- Accomplice -- The bargain -- Spider in the corner -- For sale -- Time travel -- Summer storm -- The lost garden -- Unsaid.

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.