But Jesus said to them: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such.”

—Matthew 19:14

“Evil,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, “is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured.” Pains can either be borne in emulation of Christ crucified or they can be borne bitterly, like arbitrary afflictions lacking meaning and mystery.

Dana Gioia, the poet and public intellectual who has done more than any other living figure to galvanize the Catholic literary tradition, prompts this either / or in a number of his poems, not a few of which unveil him as no stranger to suffering. Gioia, once a business executive and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, acquired a keen knowledge of loss when in December of 1987 his four-month-old son Michael Jasper died of sudden infant death syndrome.

As he said after the death, “I saw poetry differently. Writing took on a spiritual urgency I had never experienced before.” Often this urgency leads us through hellish landscapes, lairs of despair. And yet, as Janet McCann observes, if Gioia’s poetry can be dark, it “isn’t nihilistic, nor is it unforgiving.” “Special Treatments Ward”  is one striking example.  In this poem, the narrator’s reduced state leaves the reader rattled; the suffering of innocents has left him lost. Taken as a whole, however, the poem elevates us above this world’s ceiling, ameliorating our losses through the dead children’s healing.