The poet Dana Gioia, who will turn 70 later this year, has eluded classification throughout his career. Increasingly, however, to define his work readers have been converging on the simple but comprehensive term “classic”. Reviewers of Gioia’s 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016) read his work without preconceptions and recognised his poems’ distinctive power and elegance.
When Gioia published his first book, Daily Horoscope, in 1986, several critics used his job at General Foods to label him as “Yuppie Poet” and “Poet of Money”, overlooking figures such as Wallace Stevens, TS Eliot and Charles Ives who successfully combined business and the arts. A few poems dealt with the life of work, but rather than glorify it, they evoked its human costs. In “Men after Work”, diners at a coffee shop find that even the “bitterness” of their coffee, their “last taste of evening”, won’t “wake them up”.
