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Title details for Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia - Wait list

Meet Me at the Lighthouse

Poems

by Dana Gioia
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 7, 2023

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781644452165

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781644452165
      • File size: 5150 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      February 1, 2023
      Author of a dozen titles of poetry, criticism, and translation, Gioia is best known as a proponent of New Formalism, a poetic movement of the 1990s intended to revitalize the widespread use of familiar forms and conventional rhyme schemes, evident in a sonnet-like ode to a luna moth: ""baneful vagrant from the stormy skies, / Your broad wings marked with two ferocious eyes."" Memory and nostalgia serve as prominent themes throughout the book, often treated with shrugs of humor. One speaker fondly recalls an expedition to a ""volcano's sulphurous perimeter,"" where the volcano now has a caf�, and the ""cities you revisit are populated by strangers / dressed like American teenagers."" But Gioia just as easily turns a critical eye to the past and uses alliterative levity to skewer even a figure as sacrosanct as Baudelaire, ""memorious and metrical"" though he may be, since ""Lost is the life of languor and longueurs."" A ballad about Jes�s Ortiz, the poet's great-grandfather, ties together history, memory, and Gioia's Mexican American ancestry.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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