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“How soon we come to road’s end,” Charles Wright begins his poem “Apologia Pro Vita Sua.”

But this beauty, this sweetness, may be deceptive, or worse: “The Wrong End of the Rainbow” finds him suggesting that memory is “telling us just those things / she thinks we want to hear,” while “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” warns that “Even a good thing remembered, however, is not as good as not remembering at all.”

But Newman is known above all for his spiritual autobiography, the “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” which he wrote in 1863, in response to a critic’s claim that Newman, because he was a Catholic priest, could not be trusted to tell the truth, for “truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.”

The show proceeds as a sustained, cryptic, circular apologia pro vita sua, in which childhood tragedies and grown-up losses in love are anatomized like corpses in a forensic lab.

Most of those books were an apologia pro vita sua.