Her first book of poems, “The Yellow House on the Corner,” was published in 1980. She studied in West Germany on a Fulbright scholarship and received her M.F.A. Her father was one of the first black chemists in the American tire industry. He hears the Haitians sing without R’s as they swing the great machetes: “Katalina,” they sing, “Katalina, mi madle, mi amol en muelte.” God knows his mother was no stupid woman she could roll her R’s like a queen. He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth gnawed to arrowheads. The general sees the fields of sugarcane, lashed by rain and streaming. In Trujillo we witness homicidal glee but also a bruised humanity. She pivots formally, too, between hints of the sestina and the villanelle. At one moment we are in the cane fields, the next Trujillo’s palace. Dove’s poem about this massacre is among her most ambitious and assured.
Rita Dove’s new collection spans decades of her career as a poet.
Take for example “Parsley,” the final poem in her collection “Museum” (1983). Dove’s poetry that the precision and dexterity in her work - the darkness, too - can catch you unawares. There are so many casual pleasures in Ms. Fig Newtons and “King Lear,” bitter lemon as well for Othello, that desolate conspicuous soul. Dove, who recalls in “In the Old Neighborhood,” one of her most evocative poems:Ĭandy buttons went with Brenda Starr, Bazooka bubble gum with the Justice League of America. (Come for the erudition stay for the early onset diabetes.) So, it seems, did Ms. Perhaps you grew up, as I did, attaching your addiction to reading with an addiction to eating. “Bee vomit,” a boy tells his sister in one poem, “that’s all honey is.” In another, there’s this snapshot of the breakfast table: “ You are mine, I say to the twice-dunked cruller/before I eat it.” Dove’s career-spanning new “Collected Poems: 1974-2004” demonstrates that this poet’s work leans, too, on the consolations of food: fried fish and hominy, martinis and beer, caviar and sour herring.
#Rita dove persephone falling series
To read the poems of Rita Dove, to go where they take you, is to follow her deeply into a series of themes and their subsets: African-Americans in history and right now, ideas of indenture and independence, sex, travel, language (she compares commas to “miniature scythes”), family, motherhood, roomy adult love and whatever is coming out of the radio.
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