Review: Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia

Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia
Graywolf Press, 2023; 72 pp., $16

I love music. I love poetry. For me, and I believe for Dana Gioia, the two have much to do with each other. I can remember the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in high school. I had a job at the Paramus Park Mall in Hackensack, NJ, at a frozen yogurt shop located across from a music store.  Every other Friday, on payday, I would head to the music store after my shift to buy a new vinyl album. Arriving home, I would sit on the bed and listen to each song. In those days, you could follow along with the lyrics which were written on the album cover or on an insert. After listening through the entire album and combing through the liner notes for extra nuggets of meaning, I would, over the course of the following week, go back and listen to my favorite songs on repeat until I no longer needed the lyric sheet to sing along.

Dana Gioia’s latest book of poetry, Meet Me at the Lighthouse, is deserving of the same treatment as those beloved records of my teenage years, and its modest 54-page length, divided into five sections, lends itself nicely to an initial read all in one sitting.

To get the full effect, you can find videos of Dana reading the poems “Meet Me at the Lighthouse” and “Psalm of the Heights” on his YouTube channel and hear him read “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz” on Rattlecast Episode 77 at the 44:45-minute mark. I recommend that you listen to them a few times until you have the pacing and tone of Dana’s voice sounding in your head. You can also hear his recording of “Hot Summer Night” and “Too Bad” with modest musical texturing in the background on Helen Sung’s album Sung with Words, a collaborative project between Sung and Gioia on both Apple Music and Spotify. Grab your copy of the book and read along as you listen as though you were listening to a favorite song while reading the lyrics on the album cover. I have had the pleasure of hearing Dana read several poems that appear in his latest collection live last summer, and then again at a conference where he was accompanied by the jazz pianist and composer Helen Sung. These experiences let me hear Dana’s voice in my head as I read through the collection.

Dana’s work is enjoyable, accessible, and deeply meaningful. He is a great storyteller, and his poems lend themselves to being read aloud. You don’t need a PhD in literature to make sense of his work. For the most part, he uses familiar language. But in the instances where he makes a reference not likely to be known by all, he has included brief notes in the spirit of liner notes at the back of the book. Though the poems can be read without them, these notes can enrich the experience of reading the poems.

Many poems in this volume achieve a level of intimacy that makes it easy to imagine oneself as witness to the events or as a close confidant. The opening poem, from which the collection takes its title, invites us to time travel into a parallel or fantasy world that looks a lot like our own, a jazz club back in 1971. I hear Dana’s voice in my head—that warm, evenly paced, intimate, and slightly graveled tone—as I read:

Meet me at the Lighthouse on Hermosa Beach,
That shabby nightclub on its foggy pier.
Let’s aim for the summer of ’71,
When all our friends were young and immortal.

It is as if he were standing next to me issuing a real invitation. The poem manages to be a little cheeky while invoking the eternal with echoes of the communion of saints, but reimagined as the dead jazz greats, convening for a drink in a bar that exists outside of time:

The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus.
Gerry, Cannonball, Hampton and Stan,
With Chet and Art, those gorgeous greenhorns—
The swinging-masters of our West Coast soul.

The timeless and the temporal intersect in this first poem and set the reader up to suspend disbelief in order to enter the world of the poem, one where the living and the dead converge in a time that is both in the past and part of eternity.  The opening poem sets the tone for the collection, which deals with everyday matters but points to an ever-present eternal reality undergirding it.

The poem Three Drunk Poets, recounts a late-night walk where three friends, walking along reciting poetry aloud from memory, agree:

We would not turn around, we vowed,
until one of us ran out of poems. Some ideas
seem brilliant when you are blitzed.

It turns out the three companions were rich with memory; they walked until “The streets became an empty country lane, / silvered by the moon” and until they noticed they had “outwalked the furthest city light” (an allusion to Robert Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night”).  One can easily imagine this scene as a true story, yet there is that telltale something humming beneath the surface, the hum we began to detect in “Meet Me at the Lighthouse,” suggesting there is something eternal underlying the everyday world that we encounter at the edge of the city—or in a dream or in poetry—pointing to a reality more real.

The poem “Travel” begins as a poem about someone who doesn’t like to travel and who does not relate to the excitement his coworkers feel who “gush over colorful brochures.” The speaker says:

I’m satisfied to get a postcard with a foreign stamp.
I feel no need to vacate my own existence.
Isn’t the point to be happy where you are?

This would have been a satisfactory ending, the speaker embodying a voice of wisdom, a perspective that those who long for adventure have yet to discover. But then Gioia turns the poem back on the speaker, in the final line: “But so little in life is about being happy.” This final line calls into question what at first appears to be the lesson of the previous stanza. Instead of leaving the reader with a conclusion, Gioia leaves us with a question that reverberates like a musical note well past the ending of the poem. What, then, is life about?

The dead are ever-present in this opening section of poems. The collection is haunted by the friendly ghosts of ancestors and the Holy Spirit. In the poem “Seaward,” for example, written to in memory of his uncle Theodor Ortiz, US Merchant Marine, Gioia captures that sense of disbelief when we receive news of someone passing unexpectedly:

The empty lighthouse
Flanks the sound,
Mute memorial
To the drowned.
Stand on the dock
As the ocean swells.
Death is what happens
To somebody else.

In the hands of a less capable poet, the nostalgic poem “Tinsel, Frankincense and Fir” might risk being too sentimental. In this poem, set in the present day, the speaker, while hanging modest heirloom ornaments on a tree, recalls past Christmases when his mother did the same. As in “Travel,” this poem offers, in the final line of the penultimate stanza, what might be a satisfactory ending line for many a poet: “Nothing was too little to be loved.” But then, Gioia instead of concluding the poem here, moves in the last stanza into a contemplation that offers an even deeper wisdom:

Why do the dead insist on bringing gifts
We can’t reciprocate? We wrap her hope
Around the tree crowned with a fragile star.
No holiday is holy without ghosts.

Once again Gioia fuses two worlds of the living and of the dead. We can’t reciprocate their love because they are dead. But we remember their love with love, and they become present to us.

Time and again, Gioia moves between particular moments out of ordinary life, the lives of his family and friends, which might as easily be our family and friends, and moments of profound truth and insight, a truth and insight only made possible by the faith that undergirds his writing. His is a world where, as he says in “Words, Words, Words”: “the angel came, possessed us, and departed.”

Section III in the collection is dedicated to a series of poems focused on Gioia’s native home of Los Angeles, the city, he says sadly, that has lost its angels. In “Psalm and Lament for Los Angeles,” he wanders “the silent ruins” of his city and mourns what it has become and what is no longer there. He accuses the city in language that echoes the harsh critiques of biblical prophets:

But, O Los Angeles, you dash your children against the stones.
You devour your natives and your immigrants.

“Psalm of the Heights,” by contrast, is a love poem to Los Angeles written in three short parts. It is not an overly romantic love poem that overlooks the city’s many flaws, but a mature love poem that sees the beauty and the darkness and loves anyway. The poem opens:

You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles
Until you have seen it at a distance after dark.

This vantage offers a perspective where he can view the city as “silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.” The traffic, filled with a “pulsing anger” when encountered up close and during the day, becomes like a “shining river flowing” at night, while the lights of the city become like the immortal constellations. The poem sees possibility for both the city and her inhabitants, though it is a possibility tinged with sorrow. He addresses those who might want to move away, but warns:

You’ll miss the juvenescent rapture of LA
Where ecstasy cohabits with despair.

The final poem in this section, “Psalm for Our Lady Queen of Angels,” invites the reader to shift from being a mere spectator:

Let us sing to our city a new song,
A song that remembers its name and its founders—

The poem goes on to honor and praise the “Los Pobladores, the forgotten forty-four” who built the pueblo that would grow into Los Angeles and ends with a litany of prayers.

Section IV opens with three translations of poems by Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda. The translations are a treat, the way songs by earlier singers can provide a new pleasure when reconceived and performed by more recent artists.  And, like a musical artist who has to make choices about pacing, rhythm, what parts to highlight and what parts to let recede, so to a translator of poetry must make similar decisions. In the hands of Dana Gioia, the beauty of the original poems shines through.

So yes, Mr. Gioia, I will gladly meet you at the lighthouse, and take it upon myself to memorize some Yeats, Tennyson, Thomas, and Rossetti, so that perhaps one day I may wander beyond the last lights of the city with friends, sharing bits of verse. I won’t need to get drunk, except on poetry.