Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia
In Dana Gioia’s latest poetry collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse, published in February by Graywolf Press, memory is a dynamic force. With lines like, “No holiday is holy without ghosts,” Gioia leads us through the murky yet dimensional territory of remembrance. Poems jump between forms and themes: a ballad about the poet’s great-grandfather, elegies for the Los Angeles of his childhood, a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Gioia guides the reader through these leaps with ease, using a steady hand to tactfully construct bridges between such diverse offerings. A couple of times we slip into the current of nostalgia, but we’re never far from solid ground. In the hands of a lesser poet, the book’s structure could become distracting, but the former California Poet Laureate demonstrates his expansive range and experience without any notes of pretension.
Among the landscapes he draws for the reader, Gioia is generous with his personal history. The titular poem is addressed to his late cousin and conjures the familiarity of a real, long-shut bar populated by jazz legends. He evokes the Los Angeles neighborhood of his working-class childhood alongside its current condition as a “strange and empty land.” Perhaps most notably, Gioia’s final poem leads us through a version of Hell with packed subway cars and echoes of language from greats including Dante, T. S. Eliot, and Virgil. He shows his confidence in navigating this spiritual realm, perhaps demonstrating what he expects to stay with him through the end.
The collection feels like a mix between a guided tour of a dreamscape and an eclectic scrapbook; Gioia gifts us images that are clear and concrete, yet suspended in a realm that flirts with reality. I felt a delightful sense of discovery with the musicality on every page. These poems exist in a special sphere that “sings like a car radio, and no one / Asks your age because we’re all immortal.” Throughout Meet Me at the Lighthouse, Gioia’s use of formal techniques like rhyme, lyricism, borrowed language, and fixed forms invoke the comfort and rhythm of memory—how we erode the past into narrative gems.
—Review by Claire Scott
