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Collected Poems: 1974-2004
Finalist for the 2016 National Book AwardFinalist for the 2017 NAACP Image AwardThree decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume.
Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” (Poetry magazine).
Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” (Poetry magazine).
387 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 16, 2016
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About the author
Rita Dove
95 books256 followersRita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and musician, lives in Charlottesville, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
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April 8, 2025
Rita Dove is a national treasure. A former Poet Laureate, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize (only the second Black writer to win it), 29 honorary doctorates, the only poet to be awarded both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, an NAACP Image Award, and more yet even all her accolades cannot possibly prepare you for the depth, the beauty, and the power of her work. Collected Poems: 1974 - 2004 is an extraordinary overview of her work ranging from her first collection, The Yellow House on the Corner in 1980 through American Smooth in 2004. With lyrical prose that ‘sizzles with stars’ across vibrant images, Dove traverses across history, culture, identity and everyday life on her poetic explorations. There is an incredible sense of balance between the universal and the singular in her poems and the boldness of broad history juxtaposed with domestic life or everyday moments because, as she writes in
I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land
, ‘what was bliss / but the ordinary life?’ Profound and profoundly moving, this is an amazing collection honoring the decorated career of this essential American poet.
What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.
—from Ars Poetica
Born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, Rita Dove has lived quite the incredible life of language that has dazzled both on the page and in the classrooms. A teacher of writing, Dove also served as the youngest Poet Laureate (Dove was 40 at the time) and used her post to draw attention to the Black experience through art. Her work is often closely knit to ideas on Black identity, with poetry that celebrates civil rights activists like Claudette Colvin—’I help those who can’t help themselves, / I do what needs to be done’ she writes in Claudette Colvin Goes to Work —or Rosa Parks in her 1999 collection On the Bus With Rosa Parks. Here’s her poem Rosa:
How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.
That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.
Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.
How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
her purse. That courtesy.
Her Pulitzer winning collection, Thomas and Beulah, is an semi-fictional narrative about her maternal grandparents that explores the emotional resonance of the Great Migration and recontextualizes the idea of “home”. But her work explores a vast variety of subjects and love and joy is often close at hand, examining how ‘there are ways / to make of the moment // a topiary / so the pleasure’s in // walking through,’ as she writes in Flirtation . Indeed, the act of reading her poetry is one of those very moments where we saunter through a series of pleasures of the moment.
Pithos
Climb
into a jar
and live
for a while.
Chill earth.
No stars
in this stone
sky.
You have ceased
to ache.
Your spine is
a flower.
‘If you want to be a poet, the world has to fall away,’ Dove advises in an interview with the Georgia Review, ‘there’s that feeling of diving deep and stirring things up without knowing exactly what is going to come out.’ Her work largely becomes a brilliant example how a poet must ‘admit to that kind of mystery and confusion,’ and then transfer it onto the page in a way that brings the interiority of ones mind into a gorgeous space for universal appreciation and guidance. It is ‘an essential condition for a poet,’ she tells us:
I love the way the interior world is writ large in her works. I love, for instance, her examination of aging in the poem Götterdämmerung (titled after the last cycle of Wagner’s epic musical drama Der Ring des Nibelungen ) and how empowering and positive it is:
So I wear cosmetics maliciously
now. And I like my bracelets,
even though they sound ridiculous,
clinking as I skulk through the mall,
store to store like some ancient
iron-clawed griffin—but I've never
stopped wanting to cross
the equator, or touch an elk's
horns, or sing Tosca or screw
James Dean in a field of wheat.
To hell with wisdom. They're all wrong:
I'll never be through with my life.
Though her work on the interior life is especially moving in many of her depictions of the smaller moments nestled into life that we often overlook. Dove gives them space to validate them, such as the exhaustion of a mother in the poem Daystar:
She wanted a little room for thinking;
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children’s naps.
Sometimes there were things to watch –
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she’d see only her own vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour – where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
In this way she elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary and makes the small moments worth the space of epic poems. But most of all, I love her notion on embracing the mystery and unknown, and how something can be untangleable and unexplained and out of reach yet still something “true,” something important.
Geometry
I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
and above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.
As a huge fan of any poem about Persephone from Greek myth, perhaps my favorite collection contained within this book is Dove’s 1995 collection Mother Love. Written in seven verse-cycle sections, Dove retells the story of Demeter and Persephone in what she says was written ‘in homage and as counterpoint to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.’ There is a 10 page banger of a poem, Persephone in Hell, detailing the trials and tribulations of Persephone who ‘was not quite twenty when I first went down / into the stone chasms of the City of Light’ and Dove’s poems move between the world of the myth and the modern day to touch upon mother-daughter relationships. Dove’s expertise is often in making myths out of life.
The Breathing, The Endless News
Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts: elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle
for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles....
Children know this; they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly
with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped-over toddler clothes:
no blossoming there. So we
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do-
line them up and shoot them.
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.
There is a lot of joy in these poems and that is a big part of what makes them really hit hard for me. Especially the empowerment on how it can be the little things, the small loves, that can sustain us. Or, as she writes, ‘ in the midst of horror / we fed on beauty—and that, / my love, is what sustained us.’ Thanks Dove, the beauty does help and so does the wonderful optimism.
Dawn Revisited
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits -
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.
An incredible poet with an incredible collection of works, Rita Dove’s Collected Poems is a treasured book on my shelves. High decorated and deservingly so, she has crafted such profound and moving poems and I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.
5/5
THREE DAYS OF FOREST, A RIVER, FREE
The dogs have nothing better
to do than bark; duty’s whistle
slings a bright cord
around their throats.
I’ll stand here all night
if need be, no more real
than a tree when no moon shines.
The terror of waking is a trust
drawn out unbearably
until nothing, not even love,
makes it easier, and yet
I love this life:
three days of forest,
the mute riot of leaves.
Who can point out a smell
but a dog? The way is free
to the river. Tell me,
Lord, how it feels
to burst out like a rose.
Blood rises in my head—
I’m there.
Faint tongue, dry fear,
I think I lost you to the dogs,
so far off now they’re no
more than a chain of bells
ringing darkly, underground.
What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.
—from Ars Poetica
Born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, Rita Dove has lived quite the incredible life of language that has dazzled both on the page and in the classrooms. A teacher of writing, Dove also served as the youngest Poet Laureate (Dove was 40 at the time) and used her post to draw attention to the Black experience through art. Her work is often closely knit to ideas on Black identity, with poetry that celebrates civil rights activists like Claudette Colvin—’I help those who can’t help themselves, / I do what needs to be done’ she writes in Claudette Colvin Goes to Work —or Rosa Parks in her 1999 collection On the Bus With Rosa Parks. Here’s her poem Rosa:
How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.
That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.
Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.
How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
her purse. That courtesy.
Her Pulitzer winning collection, Thomas and Beulah, is an semi-fictional narrative about her maternal grandparents that explores the emotional resonance of the Great Migration and recontextualizes the idea of “home”. But her work explores a vast variety of subjects and love and joy is often close at hand, examining how ‘there are ways / to make of the moment // a topiary / so the pleasure’s in // walking through,’ as she writes in Flirtation . Indeed, the act of reading her poetry is one of those very moments where we saunter through a series of pleasures of the moment.
Pithos
Climb
into a jar
and live
for a while.
Chill earth.
No stars
in this stone
sky.
You have ceased
to ache.
Your spine is
a flower.
‘If you want to be a poet, the world has to fall away,’ Dove advises in an interview with the Georgia Review, ‘there’s that feeling of diving deep and stirring things up without knowing exactly what is going to come out.’ Her work largely becomes a brilliant example how a poet must ‘admit to that kind of mystery and confusion,’ and then transfer it onto the page in a way that brings the interiority of ones mind into a gorgeous space for universal appreciation and guidance. It is ‘an essential condition for a poet,’ she tells us:
‘The interior life can spill all over the place; it’s vital for the poem, and every poet has a different way of accessing that vital fluid. But where do you start? It doesn’t work by subject or through emotion, though they may be the forces that propel you. I need to enter the interior through language; for me, experience, emotion, and prosody are inextricably bound together. Getting to the center of the interior life, then back out onto the page.
I love the way the interior world is writ large in her works. I love, for instance, her examination of aging in the poem Götterdämmerung (titled after the last cycle of Wagner’s epic musical drama Der Ring des Nibelungen ) and how empowering and positive it is:
So I wear cosmetics maliciously
now. And I like my bracelets,
even though they sound ridiculous,
clinking as I skulk through the mall,
store to store like some ancient
iron-clawed griffin—but I've never
stopped wanting to cross
the equator, or touch an elk's
horns, or sing Tosca or screw
James Dean in a field of wheat.
To hell with wisdom. They're all wrong:
I'll never be through with my life.
Though her work on the interior life is especially moving in many of her depictions of the smaller moments nestled into life that we often overlook. Dove gives them space to validate them, such as the exhaustion of a mother in the poem Daystar:
She wanted a little room for thinking;
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children’s naps.
Sometimes there were things to watch –
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she’d see only her own vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour – where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
In this way she elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary and makes the small moments worth the space of epic poems. But most of all, I love her notion on embracing the mystery and unknown, and how something can be untangleable and unexplained and out of reach yet still something “true,” something important.
Geometry
I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
and above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.
As a huge fan of any poem about Persephone from Greek myth, perhaps my favorite collection contained within this book is Dove’s 1995 collection Mother Love. Written in seven verse-cycle sections, Dove retells the story of Demeter and Persephone in what she says was written ‘in homage and as counterpoint to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.’ There is a 10 page banger of a poem, Persephone in Hell, detailing the trials and tribulations of Persephone who ‘was not quite twenty when I first went down / into the stone chasms of the City of Light’ and Dove’s poems move between the world of the myth and the modern day to touch upon mother-daughter relationships. Dove’s expertise is often in making myths out of life.
The Breathing, The Endless News
Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts: elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle
for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles....
Children know this; they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly
with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped-over toddler clothes:
no blossoming there. So we
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do-
line them up and shoot them.
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.
There is a lot of joy in these poems and that is a big part of what makes them really hit hard for me. Especially the empowerment on how it can be the little things, the small loves, that can sustain us. Or, as she writes, ‘ in the midst of horror / we fed on beauty—and that, / my love, is what sustained us.’ Thanks Dove, the beauty does help and so does the wonderful optimism.
Dawn Revisited
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits -
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.
An incredible poet with an incredible collection of works, Rita Dove’s Collected Poems is a treasured book on my shelves. High decorated and deservingly so, she has crafted such profound and moving poems and I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.
5/5
THREE DAYS OF FOREST, A RIVER, FREE
The dogs have nothing better
to do than bark; duty’s whistle
slings a bright cord
around their throats.
I’ll stand here all night
if need be, no more real
than a tree when no moon shines.
The terror of waking is a trust
drawn out unbearably
until nothing, not even love,
makes it easier, and yet
I love this life:
three days of forest,
the mute riot of leaves.
Who can point out a smell
but a dog? The way is free
to the river. Tell me,
Lord, how it feels
to burst out like a rose.
Blood rises in my head—
I’m there.
Faint tongue, dry fear,
I think I lost you to the dogs,
so far off now they’re no
more than a chain of bells
ringing darkly, underground.
May 8, 2017
EXCELLENT!!!!! It took me a while to get through the entire collection but it was well worth the careful reading. Rita Dove is brilliant and if you haven't read any of her poetry you should. I wish I would have been assigned her poetry when I was college. It would have made for great class discussion.
January 24, 2021
At this point, this collection is a dear friend. I've read a poem or two each morning since the height of my quarantine aimlessness in mid June. Dove has been my constant, startling me, making me pause and reread and dog-ear pages, pushing me to furiously Google figures from history or mythology or movies. Meanwhile, my back has given me trouble on and off since this summer, and I can't tell you how many mornings, at like 5AM, I've waited for water to boil while lying as flat as possible on my kitchen floor and googling something from one of Dove's poems. I've read about David Walker and Benjamin Banneker and Claudette Colvin and Hattie McDaniel. I found out what a "pithos" is ("Your spine is / a flower") and read an article comparing Joaquin Phoenix's Joker to Christian Schad's Pigeon-Chested Man ("its crests and fins / a colony of birds, trying / to get out"). The other morning, after reading Dove's "The Seven Veils of Salomé," I ended up watching the end of Salome (1953) on Youtube, starting with Rita Hayworth's dance for Herod ("O Mother, what else is a girl to do?").
In seven volumes of poetry from 1980 to 2004 (!!), Dove's writing spans from history to mythology to art, traverses from her childhood in the American midwest to her travels across Europe, arches wide and then gets real personal. It feels a little weird to finally put this book back on the shelf, but I have a feeling I'll be coming back to it.
***
"Bee vomit, he said once, / that's all honey is, so that / I could not put my tongue to its / jellied flame without tasting / regurgitated blossoms" (4).
"Who discovered usefulness? / Who forgot how to sing, simply?" (108).
"Like all art / useless and beautiful, like / sailing in air, / things happened / to her" (142).
"I won't promise anything. I am a magic / that can deafen you like a rainstorm or a well" (199).
"O these / trees, shedding all / over themselves. / Only a fool / would think such frenzy / beautiful" (319).
"But I'm not sad -- on the way back / through the twigs I glimpsed / in a broken windowbox by the roadside / mums: / stunned lavenders and pinks / dusted with soot. / I am a little like them, / heavy-headed, / rough curls open to the rain" (374).
In seven volumes of poetry from 1980 to 2004 (!!), Dove's writing spans from history to mythology to art, traverses from her childhood in the American midwest to her travels across Europe, arches wide and then gets real personal. It feels a little weird to finally put this book back on the shelf, but I have a feeling I'll be coming back to it.
***
"Bee vomit, he said once, / that's all honey is, so that / I could not put my tongue to its / jellied flame without tasting / regurgitated blossoms" (4).
"Who discovered usefulness? / Who forgot how to sing, simply?" (108).
"Like all art / useless and beautiful, like / sailing in air, / things happened / to her" (142).
"I won't promise anything. I am a magic / that can deafen you like a rainstorm or a well" (199).
"O these / trees, shedding all / over themselves. / Only a fool / would think such frenzy / beautiful" (319).
"But I'm not sad -- on the way back / through the twigs I glimpsed / in a broken windowbox by the roadside / mums: / stunned lavenders and pinks / dusted with soot. / I am a little like them, / heavy-headed, / rough curls open to the rain" (374).
June 20, 2018
4.5 stars
Impeccable poetry.
I think my favorites were from Grace Notes: Poems, Mother Love, and On the Bus With Rosa Parks - that's roughly the poems Rita Dove had published in collections between 1989 and 1999. It will be interesting to read these collected works again, in the future, and see if that remains true!
Impeccable poetry.
I think my favorites were from Grace Notes: Poems, Mother Love, and On the Bus With Rosa Parks - that's roughly the poems Rita Dove had published in collections between 1989 and 1999. It will be interesting to read these collected works again, in the future, and see if that remains true!
November 27, 2017
Actually, four and one-half (4 1/2) stars; not four (4) alone.
Years ago, I read the Holy Bible cover to cover and walked away thinking that while it is the voice of God as told through humanity -- and thus, an autobiography of sorts of God Almighty written by a whole bunch of "ghost writers" or writers inhibited with the Holy Ghost -- it made for some pretty good reading. But I also felt it was an interesting autobiography in that it told of the arc of God's own spiritual and emotional maturation or "development" if you will. Not only God's spiritual and emotional maturation or "development" but humanity's spiritual and emotional maturation or "development" with God; a sort of symbiotic, yin and yang "thang". Surely some will accuse me of being somewhat sacrilegious here but what little I understand of our Maker -- and who amongst us can say they understand much of anything in the mind of God -- the concept fits when you step back and take a macrocosmic view of the Creator of the cosmos. Now, what's that got to do with this book, "Collected Poems: 1974-2004" by Rita Dove? Everything! The same thoughts oft arose while reading this one. Great poetry has many of the same traits as great religious thought. It slips me in to the mind of God.
This book of "Collected Poems" is actually seven (7) of Rita Dove's books covering the bulk of her work during her earlier creative period. I say earlier because I sincerely hope this is not the end but the beginning of some of her best and most creative work. It showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned Rita Dove a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. The only weak spots appear in the first two (2) "chapters" or books -- "The Yellow House on the Corner" on her adolescence and "irreverent musings" in "Museum" -- nevertheless, the early creative power and genius of Rita Dove shines through in both of these "chapters".
By the time I got to her Pulitzer Prize winning love story -- "Thomas and Beulah" -- "set against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil rights struggles," I was a "believer". My favorites are found throughout "Mother Love" -- identified here as the "exquisite reinvention of Greek myth" as told in sonnet format -- the "multifaceted gems" in "Grace Notes" and the "troubling rapids of recent history" in "On the Bus with Rosa Parks" finishing with a fine finesse in "American Smooth" -- an "homage to America's kaleidoscopic cultural heritage." All five (5) of these chapters or books were nothing short of enthralling, ground breaking and breath taking in scope, creativity and invention. Rita Dove tells it like it was to her and like it is to me -- damn straight there!! Spectacular, simply spectacular! Again, I risk being irreverent here but I daresay it reaffirms my thought that "I like my coffee like I like my women" and now like I like my choice in poets -- black, brown or tanned and with a whole lotta attitude!
If it's so darned good, then why give it only four and one-half stars (4 1/2)? Probably because the earlier work was, well, not to put too fine a point on it, not that good and, at times, rather trying. In fact, the first two (2) "chapters" took me a long time to read because: a) I kept going back to make sure I truly did read what I just read; and/or b) frankly, I did not understand it when I read it and still don't. When poetry becomes too obtuse and difficult for me to read, it tends to turn me off completely, as when you mix A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, William S. Burroughs, Jim Morrison and Hunter S. Thompson you'll end up getting mind-blowing thoughts about what is essentially pure horse manure. But to say Rita Dove's earlier work is "all that and a bag of chips" would be harsh, insensitive and just plain wrong. She's a brilliant "wordsmythe" in her own right whom, I hope and trust, is just getting started here and has another thirty (30) years ahead of her. Rock on, Rita!
Despite it's four and one-half (4 1/2) star rating, I am going to list this as among my "favorites" and as one of the best books read in 2017; well-deserving of its nomination to the National Book Award for Poetry in 2016. Now on to more of the 2016 NBA nominees! It's a GREAT reading life, my goodreads "homies" -- damn straight that!
Years ago, I read the Holy Bible cover to cover and walked away thinking that while it is the voice of God as told through humanity -- and thus, an autobiography of sorts of God Almighty written by a whole bunch of "ghost writers" or writers inhibited with the Holy Ghost -- it made for some pretty good reading. But I also felt it was an interesting autobiography in that it told of the arc of God's own spiritual and emotional maturation or "development" if you will. Not only God's spiritual and emotional maturation or "development" but humanity's spiritual and emotional maturation or "development" with God; a sort of symbiotic, yin and yang "thang". Surely some will accuse me of being somewhat sacrilegious here but what little I understand of our Maker -- and who amongst us can say they understand much of anything in the mind of God -- the concept fits when you step back and take a macrocosmic view of the Creator of the cosmos. Now, what's that got to do with this book, "Collected Poems: 1974-2004" by Rita Dove? Everything! The same thoughts oft arose while reading this one. Great poetry has many of the same traits as great religious thought. It slips me in to the mind of God.
This book of "Collected Poems" is actually seven (7) of Rita Dove's books covering the bulk of her work during her earlier creative period. I say earlier because I sincerely hope this is not the end but the beginning of some of her best and most creative work. It showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned Rita Dove a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. The only weak spots appear in the first two (2) "chapters" or books -- "The Yellow House on the Corner" on her adolescence and "irreverent musings" in "Museum" -- nevertheless, the early creative power and genius of Rita Dove shines through in both of these "chapters".
By the time I got to her Pulitzer Prize winning love story -- "Thomas and Beulah" -- "set against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil rights struggles," I was a "believer". My favorites are found throughout "Mother Love" -- identified here as the "exquisite reinvention of Greek myth" as told in sonnet format -- the "multifaceted gems" in "Grace Notes" and the "troubling rapids of recent history" in "On the Bus with Rosa Parks" finishing with a fine finesse in "American Smooth" -- an "homage to America's kaleidoscopic cultural heritage." All five (5) of these chapters or books were nothing short of enthralling, ground breaking and breath taking in scope, creativity and invention. Rita Dove tells it like it was to her and like it is to me -- damn straight there!! Spectacular, simply spectacular! Again, I risk being irreverent here but I daresay it reaffirms my thought that "I like my coffee like I like my women" and now like I like my choice in poets -- black, brown or tanned and with a whole lotta attitude!
If it's so darned good, then why give it only four and one-half stars (4 1/2)? Probably because the earlier work was, well, not to put too fine a point on it, not that good and, at times, rather trying. In fact, the first two (2) "chapters" took me a long time to read because: a) I kept going back to make sure I truly did read what I just read; and/or b) frankly, I did not understand it when I read it and still don't. When poetry becomes too obtuse and difficult for me to read, it tends to turn me off completely, as when you mix A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, William S. Burroughs, Jim Morrison and Hunter S. Thompson you'll end up getting mind-blowing thoughts about what is essentially pure horse manure. But to say Rita Dove's earlier work is "all that and a bag of chips" would be harsh, insensitive and just plain wrong. She's a brilliant "wordsmythe" in her own right whom, I hope and trust, is just getting started here and has another thirty (30) years ahead of her. Rock on, Rita!
Despite it's four and one-half (4 1/2) star rating, I am going to list this as among my "favorites" and as one of the best books read in 2017; well-deserving of its nomination to the National Book Award for Poetry in 2016. Now on to more of the 2016 NBA nominees! It's a GREAT reading life, my goodreads "homies" -- damn straight that!
Read
May 14, 2017Weirdly, this review runs the risk of me airing my grievances about collected volumes of poetry: there's something about the material value of slim volumes, the experience of finding one that packs the punch of a full novel. This effect seems dulled to me when poems are formatted as they are here, where one poem begins immediately after another ends, instead of on a new page—a sure way to save paper, along with the slightly oversized pages. But this does do something to the experience of reading the poems themselves, something I haven't quite been able to pin down.
That aside, this was a stellar read. The sustained run from Thomas and Beulah through On the Bus with Rosa Parks is really a major accomplishment—seeing her fully wield the power of a poem cycle, which she flirts with in her first two books, and then blow said power of poem cycle up to capture the stories of her family as well as historical moments and intimate memories. That said, I found American Smooth to be bloated, but that could very well be the consequence of encountering it in a collected rather than as its own volume. It's weird to reflect on how the way we encounter literature could alter our perceptions of it, but that's neither here nore there.
Individual ratings:
The Yellow House on the Corner: 3/5
Museum: 4/5
Thomas and Beulah: 4.5/5
Grace Notes: 5/5
Mother Love: 5/5
On the Bus with Rosa Parks: 4.5/5
American Smooth: 3.5/5
That aside, this was a stellar read. The sustained run from Thomas and Beulah through On the Bus with Rosa Parks is really a major accomplishment—seeing her fully wield the power of a poem cycle, which she flirts with in her first two books, and then blow said power of poem cycle up to capture the stories of her family as well as historical moments and intimate memories. That said, I found American Smooth to be bloated, but that could very well be the consequence of encountering it in a collected rather than as its own volume. It's weird to reflect on how the way we encounter literature could alter our perceptions of it, but that's neither here nore there.
Individual ratings:
The Yellow House on the Corner: 3/5
Museum: 4/5
Thomas and Beulah: 4.5/5
Grace Notes: 5/5
Mother Love: 5/5
On the Bus with Rosa Parks: 4.5/5
American Smooth: 3.5/5
September 9, 2019
I'd already read a small portion of this book when I read Dove's Mother Love published in 1995. All of that was included in this one which makes sense since this is a collection. There is some interesting, enlightening, and refreshing imagery in these poems. I like the story telling. I like both the personal history and other history. I like imagining through Rita Dove's eyes. I like how she sees things.
This part of a poem I like called "I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land" caught my attention :
"She knew she'd already lost everything/ except desire, the red heft of it/ warming her outstretched palm."
I love the language of poetry. I feel inspired.
This part of a poem I like called "I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land" caught my attention :
"She knew she'd already lost everything/ except desire, the red heft of it/ warming her outstretched palm."
I love the language of poetry. I feel inspired.
August 25, 2020
This collection was hit or miss for me. What I liked, I really liked and struck a chord with me. She writes in a narrative with several of the poems continuing a tale begun in another. In this way there was a familiarity in tone and mood. Some of my favorite lines included:
"What's invisible sings, and we bear witness. if we would listen!"
"He is weary of analysis, the small predictable truths."
"To him, work is a narrow grief..."
"Wretched little difference, he thinks, between enduring pain and waiting for pain
to work on others."
"Reflection is such a bloodless light."
"No sound this generous could fail: ride joy until it cracks like an egg, make sorrow
seethe and whisper."
"What's invisible sings, and we bear witness. if we would listen!"
"He is weary of analysis, the small predictable truths."
"To him, work is a narrow grief..."
"Wretched little difference, he thinks, between enduring pain and waiting for pain
to work on others."
"Reflection is such a bloodless light."
"No sound this generous could fail: ride joy until it cracks like an egg, make sorrow
seethe and whisper."
February 12, 2022
Some I loved and related to and some I had absolutely no idea. I loved the way my humunculus took over for dramatic readings.
February 13, 2021
“The sun crouched behind leaves, but the trees had long since walked away. The meaning that surfaces comes to me aslant and I go to meet it, stepping out of my body word for word, until I am everything at once: the perfume of the world in which I go under, a skindiver remembering air.”
NOVEMBER FOR BEGINNERS
Snow would be the easy way out—that softening sky
like a sigh of relief at finally being allowed to yield…
We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving…
When spring comes we promise to act the fool. Pour, rain! Sail, wind…
My first exposure to Rita Dove, and I am wowed, that wordless and speechless state of pure awe. The fragments here are the tip of the iceberg and genius, and I think I could read this poet every day for the rest of my life. She covers everything, everything we have to know or understand in this world, and says it so fiercely and succinctly. This is the American voice we all need, and it is unacceptable I had never read her before. The gems of life are not on tv, they won’t be in advertisements, or show up at your door; you have to seek them out, and share them with others. We have to, if no one else will, if high school curriculums continue to cover the same lifeless topics over and over.
Rita Dove may be the ultimate American poet because she has experienced it or bears witness to it all- the best and worst of what that means, “to be an American.” Slavery, prejudice, oppression, poverty, as well as the beauty and solace of nature and love and everything in between. I am so excited to read more of her current work, and know I will be changed.
HAPPENSTANCE
When you appeared it was as if magnets cleared the air. I had never seen that smile before or your hair, flying silver. Someone waving goodbye, she was silver, too. Of course you didn’t see me. I called softly so you could choose not to answer—then called again. You turned in the light, your eyes seeking your name.
SIGHTSEEING
But all this palaver about symbols and “the ceremony of innocence drowned” is— as you and I know—civilization’s way of manufacturing hope.
GEOMETRY I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh. As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open and above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven.
BELINDA’S PETITION (Boston, February 1782) To the honorable Senate and House of Representatives of this Country, new born: I am Belinda, an African, since the age of twelve a Slave. I will not take too much of your Time, but to plead and place my pitiable Life unto the Fathers of this Nation. Lately your Countrymen have severed the Binds of Tyranny. I would hope you would consider the Same for me, pure Air being the sole Advantage of which I can boast in my present Condition.
THE HOUSE SLAVE
Those days I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat, and as the fields unfold to whiteness, and they spill like bees among the fat flowers, I weep. It is not yet daylight.
CHOLERA
Destruction, the conjurers intoned. Some dragged themselves off at night to die in the swamp, to lie down with the voices of mud and silk. I know moonrise, I know starrise.
KENTUCKY, 1833
Now the winner is sprawled out under a tree and the sun, that weary tambourine, hesitates at the rim of the sky’s green light. It’s a crazy feeling that carries through the night; as if the sky were an omen we could not understand, the book that, if we could read, would change our lives.
NOTES FROM A TUNISIAN JOURNAL
The camels stand in all their vague beauty— at night they fold up like pale accordions. All the hedges are singing with yellow birds! A boy runs by with lemons in his hands. Food’s perfume, breath is nourishment. The stars crumble, salt above eucalyptus fields.
THE SAHARA BUS TRIP
At night they quiver imperceptibly until the leaves rustle; their perforated skins give off a faint heat. Only the Arab knows the heart of the orange: she tears herself apart to give us relief. We spend 200 milliemes for a bag of oranges so sweet our tongues lie dreaming in the juice.
If, at the end of the Atlantic, Columbus had found only an absence of water,
this English tourist would have been there to capture that void with a wide-angle lens. Here, the wind blows from nowhere to nowhere across a plain transformed by salt into a vision of light.
Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation. You start out with one thing, end up with another, and nothing’s like it used to be, not even the future.
THE FISH IN THE STONE
In the ocean the silence moves and moves and so much is unnecessary!
THE HILL HAS SOMETHING TO SAY
but isn’t talking. Instead the valley groans
as the wind, amphoric, hoots its one bad note.
Halfway up, we stop to peek through smudged pine:
this is Europe and its green terraces.
What’s left to climb’s inside us,
: it’s not all in the books (but maps don’t lie).
(For all we know the wind’s inside us, pacing
our lungs.)
THE COPPER BEECH
This trailing beech became Erpenberg’s tree of grief, their
melancholy individualist, the park philosopher. Eight meters above lawn the tousled crown rises, her many plaited branches falling like green water earthwards, a cascade of leaves.
THREE DAYS OF FOREST, A RIVER, FREE
I’ll stand here all night if need be, no more real than a tree when no moon shines. The terror of waking is a trust drawn out unbearably until nothing, not even love, makes it easier, and yet
I love this life: three days of forest, the mute riot of leaves.
FLIRTATION
An orange, peeled and quartered, flares like a tulip on a wedgwood plate. Anything can happen. Outside the sun has rolled up her rugs and night strewn salt across the sky. My heart is humming a tune
There are ways to make of the moment a topiary so the pleasure’s in walking through.
EXEUNT THE VIOLS
Listen: even the ocean mourns the passage of voices so pure and penetrant, that insect hum. Who discovered usefulness? Who forgot how to sing, simply? (Magnificence spoke up briefly, followed by the race boat’s break-neck dazzle.)…their last chord a breath drawn deep in a garden maze, there near the statue smiling under the stars.
PRIMER FOR THE NUCLEAR AGE At the edge of the mariner’s map is written: “Beyond this point lie Monsters.” Someone left the light on in the pantry—there’s a skull in there on the shelf that talks. Blue eyes in the air, blue as an idiot’s. Any fear, any memory will do; and if you’ve got a heart at all, someday it will kill you.
DEFINITION IN THE FACE OF UNNAMED FURY
Each note slips into querulous rebuke, fingerpads scored with pain, shallow ditches to rut in like a runaway slave with a barking heart. Days afterwards blisters to hide from the children.
GOSPEL Swing low so I can step inside— a humming ship of voices big with all the wrongs done done them. No sound this generous could fail: ride joy until it cracks like an egg, make sorrow seethe and whisper.
WATCHING LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD AT ROGER HAGGERTY’S HOUSE IN AUBURN, ALABAMA
Here, nothing’s mysterious—books and newspapers. The first time for anything is the best, because there is no memory linking its regrets to drop like bracelets in the grass.
DOG DAYS, JERUSALEM Exactly at six every evening I go into the garden to wait for rain. I’d been told it would come at six if at all—but the sky goes matte, so I turn on the sprinklers and follow the lizard’s woven escape as water falls through itself like pity.
OZONE . . . Does the cosmic space we dissolve into taste of us, then? —RILKE, The Second Elegy
We wire the sky for comfort; we thread it through our lungs for a perfect fit. We’ve arranged this calm, though it is constantly unraveling. Where does it go then, atmosphere suckered up an invisible flue? How can we know where it goes?
HORSE AND TREE
we reply, there is music and then it stops; the beautiful is always rising and falling. We call and the children sing back one more time. In the tree the luminous sap ascends.
THE BREATHING, THE ENDLESS NEWS
each god is empty without us, penitent, raking our yards into windblown piles. . . . Children know this: they are the trailings of gods.
ARS POETICA
What I want is this poem to be small, a ghost town on the larger map of wills. Then you can pencil me in as a hawk: a traveling x-marks-the-spot.
TESTIMONIAL Back when the earth was new and heaven just a whisper, back when the names of things hadn’t had time to stick; back when the smallest breezes melted summer into autumn, when all the poplars quivered sweetly in rank and file . . . the world called, and I answered. Each glance ignited to a gaze. I caught my breath and called that life, swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet. I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn’t know their names?
FOR SOPHIE, WHO’LL BE IN FIRST GRADE IN THE YEAR 2000 No bright toy this world we’ve left you. Even the wrapping is torn, the ribbons grease-flecked and askew. Still, it’s all we have. Wait a moment before you pick it up. Study its scratches, how it shines in places. Now love what you touch, and you will touch wisely. May the world, in your hands, brighten with use. May you sleep in sweet breath and rise always in wonder to mountain and forest, green gaze and silk cheek—
“THE SITUATION IS INTOLERABLE”
Hush, now. Assay the terrain: all around us dark and the perimeter in flames, but the stars— tiny, missionary stars— on high, serene, studding the inky brow of heaven.
QUICK
O to be gone like that, no grief nor thought of love—pure purpose poured into flight.
MEDITATION AT FIFTY YARDS, MOVING TARGET
yes o aperture o light let me off go off straight is my verb straight my glory road yes now i can feel it the light i am flame velocity o beautiful body i am coming i am yours before you know it i am home
LA CHAPELLE. 92ND DIVISION. TED. (September, 1918)
This lonely beautiful word means church and it is quiet here; the stone walls curve like slow water.
It’s Sunday and I’m standing on the bitter ridge of France, overlooking the war. La Guerre is asleep. This morning early on patrol we slipped down through the mist and scent of burning woodchips (somewhere someone was warm) into Moyenmoutier… a cloister of flushed brick and a little river braiding its dark hair. Back home in Louisiana the earth is red, but it suckles you until you can sing yourself grown. Here, even the wind has edges. Drizzle splintered around us; we stood on the arched bridge and thought for a moment of the dead we had left behind in the valley, in the terrible noise.
AGAINST FLIGHT Everyone wants to go up—but no one can imagine what it’s like when the earth smoothes out, begins to curve into its own implacable symbol.
LOOKING UP FROM THE PAGE, I AM REMINDED OF THIS MORTAL COIL Mercurial ribbon licking the cut lip of the Blue Ridge— daybreak or end, I can’t tell as long as I ignore the body’s marching orders, as long as I am alive in air . . . What good is the brain without traveling shoes?
NOVEMBER FOR BEGINNERS
Snow would be the easy way out—that softening sky
like a sigh of relief at finally being allowed to yield…
We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving…
When spring comes we promise to act the fool. Pour, rain! Sail, wind…
My first exposure to Rita Dove, and I am wowed, that wordless and speechless state of pure awe. The fragments here are the tip of the iceberg and genius, and I think I could read this poet every day for the rest of my life. She covers everything, everything we have to know or understand in this world, and says it so fiercely and succinctly. This is the American voice we all need, and it is unacceptable I had never read her before. The gems of life are not on tv, they won’t be in advertisements, or show up at your door; you have to seek them out, and share them with others. We have to, if no one else will, if high school curriculums continue to cover the same lifeless topics over and over.
Rita Dove may be the ultimate American poet because she has experienced it or bears witness to it all- the best and worst of what that means, “to be an American.” Slavery, prejudice, oppression, poverty, as well as the beauty and solace of nature and love and everything in between. I am so excited to read more of her current work, and know I will be changed.
HAPPENSTANCE
When you appeared it was as if magnets cleared the air. I had never seen that smile before or your hair, flying silver. Someone waving goodbye, she was silver, too. Of course you didn’t see me. I called softly so you could choose not to answer—then called again. You turned in the light, your eyes seeking your name.
SIGHTSEEING
But all this palaver about symbols and “the ceremony of innocence drowned” is— as you and I know—civilization’s way of manufacturing hope.
GEOMETRY I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh. As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open and above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven.
BELINDA’S PETITION (Boston, February 1782) To the honorable Senate and House of Representatives of this Country, new born: I am Belinda, an African, since the age of twelve a Slave. I will not take too much of your Time, but to plead and place my pitiable Life unto the Fathers of this Nation. Lately your Countrymen have severed the Binds of Tyranny. I would hope you would consider the Same for me, pure Air being the sole Advantage of which I can boast in my present Condition.
THE HOUSE SLAVE
Those days I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat, and as the fields unfold to whiteness, and they spill like bees among the fat flowers, I weep. It is not yet daylight.
CHOLERA
Destruction, the conjurers intoned. Some dragged themselves off at night to die in the swamp, to lie down with the voices of mud and silk. I know moonrise, I know starrise.
KENTUCKY, 1833
Now the winner is sprawled out under a tree and the sun, that weary tambourine, hesitates at the rim of the sky’s green light. It’s a crazy feeling that carries through the night; as if the sky were an omen we could not understand, the book that, if we could read, would change our lives.
NOTES FROM A TUNISIAN JOURNAL
The camels stand in all their vague beauty— at night they fold up like pale accordions. All the hedges are singing with yellow birds! A boy runs by with lemons in his hands. Food’s perfume, breath is nourishment. The stars crumble, salt above eucalyptus fields.
THE SAHARA BUS TRIP
At night they quiver imperceptibly until the leaves rustle; their perforated skins give off a faint heat. Only the Arab knows the heart of the orange: she tears herself apart to give us relief. We spend 200 milliemes for a bag of oranges so sweet our tongues lie dreaming in the juice.
If, at the end of the Atlantic, Columbus had found only an absence of water,
this English tourist would have been there to capture that void with a wide-angle lens. Here, the wind blows from nowhere to nowhere across a plain transformed by salt into a vision of light.
Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation. You start out with one thing, end up with another, and nothing’s like it used to be, not even the future.
THE FISH IN THE STONE
In the ocean the silence moves and moves and so much is unnecessary!
THE HILL HAS SOMETHING TO SAY
but isn’t talking. Instead the valley groans
as the wind, amphoric, hoots its one bad note.
Halfway up, we stop to peek through smudged pine:
this is Europe and its green terraces.
What’s left to climb’s inside us,
: it’s not all in the books (but maps don’t lie).
(For all we know the wind’s inside us, pacing
our lungs.)
THE COPPER BEECH
This trailing beech became Erpenberg’s tree of grief, their
melancholy individualist, the park philosopher. Eight meters above lawn the tousled crown rises, her many plaited branches falling like green water earthwards, a cascade of leaves.
THREE DAYS OF FOREST, A RIVER, FREE
I’ll stand here all night if need be, no more real than a tree when no moon shines. The terror of waking is a trust drawn out unbearably until nothing, not even love, makes it easier, and yet
I love this life: three days of forest, the mute riot of leaves.
FLIRTATION
An orange, peeled and quartered, flares like a tulip on a wedgwood plate. Anything can happen. Outside the sun has rolled up her rugs and night strewn salt across the sky. My heart is humming a tune
There are ways to make of the moment a topiary so the pleasure’s in walking through.
EXEUNT THE VIOLS
Listen: even the ocean mourns the passage of voices so pure and penetrant, that insect hum. Who discovered usefulness? Who forgot how to sing, simply? (Magnificence spoke up briefly, followed by the race boat’s break-neck dazzle.)…their last chord a breath drawn deep in a garden maze, there near the statue smiling under the stars.
PRIMER FOR THE NUCLEAR AGE At the edge of the mariner’s map is written: “Beyond this point lie Monsters.” Someone left the light on in the pantry—there’s a skull in there on the shelf that talks. Blue eyes in the air, blue as an idiot’s. Any fear, any memory will do; and if you’ve got a heart at all, someday it will kill you.
DEFINITION IN THE FACE OF UNNAMED FURY
Each note slips into querulous rebuke, fingerpads scored with pain, shallow ditches to rut in like a runaway slave with a barking heart. Days afterwards blisters to hide from the children.
GOSPEL Swing low so I can step inside— a humming ship of voices big with all the wrongs done done them. No sound this generous could fail: ride joy until it cracks like an egg, make sorrow seethe and whisper.
WATCHING LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD AT ROGER HAGGERTY’S HOUSE IN AUBURN, ALABAMA
Here, nothing’s mysterious—books and newspapers. The first time for anything is the best, because there is no memory linking its regrets to drop like bracelets in the grass.
DOG DAYS, JERUSALEM Exactly at six every evening I go into the garden to wait for rain. I’d been told it would come at six if at all—but the sky goes matte, so I turn on the sprinklers and follow the lizard’s woven escape as water falls through itself like pity.
OZONE . . . Does the cosmic space we dissolve into taste of us, then? —RILKE, The Second Elegy
We wire the sky for comfort; we thread it through our lungs for a perfect fit. We’ve arranged this calm, though it is constantly unraveling. Where does it go then, atmosphere suckered up an invisible flue? How can we know where it goes?
HORSE AND TREE
we reply, there is music and then it stops; the beautiful is always rising and falling. We call and the children sing back one more time. In the tree the luminous sap ascends.
THE BREATHING, THE ENDLESS NEWS
each god is empty without us, penitent, raking our yards into windblown piles. . . . Children know this: they are the trailings of gods.
ARS POETICA
What I want is this poem to be small, a ghost town on the larger map of wills. Then you can pencil me in as a hawk: a traveling x-marks-the-spot.
TESTIMONIAL Back when the earth was new and heaven just a whisper, back when the names of things hadn’t had time to stick; back when the smallest breezes melted summer into autumn, when all the poplars quivered sweetly in rank and file . . . the world called, and I answered. Each glance ignited to a gaze. I caught my breath and called that life, swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet. I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn’t know their names?
FOR SOPHIE, WHO’LL BE IN FIRST GRADE IN THE YEAR 2000 No bright toy this world we’ve left you. Even the wrapping is torn, the ribbons grease-flecked and askew. Still, it’s all we have. Wait a moment before you pick it up. Study its scratches, how it shines in places. Now love what you touch, and you will touch wisely. May the world, in your hands, brighten with use. May you sleep in sweet breath and rise always in wonder to mountain and forest, green gaze and silk cheek—
“THE SITUATION IS INTOLERABLE”
Hush, now. Assay the terrain: all around us dark and the perimeter in flames, but the stars— tiny, missionary stars— on high, serene, studding the inky brow of heaven.
QUICK
O to be gone like that, no grief nor thought of love—pure purpose poured into flight.
MEDITATION AT FIFTY YARDS, MOVING TARGET
yes o aperture o light let me off go off straight is my verb straight my glory road yes now i can feel it the light i am flame velocity o beautiful body i am coming i am yours before you know it i am home
LA CHAPELLE. 92ND DIVISION. TED. (September, 1918)
This lonely beautiful word means church and it is quiet here; the stone walls curve like slow water.
It’s Sunday and I’m standing on the bitter ridge of France, overlooking the war. La Guerre is asleep. This morning early on patrol we slipped down through the mist and scent of burning woodchips (somewhere someone was warm) into Moyenmoutier… a cloister of flushed brick and a little river braiding its dark hair. Back home in Louisiana the earth is red, but it suckles you until you can sing yourself grown. Here, even the wind has edges. Drizzle splintered around us; we stood on the arched bridge and thought for a moment of the dead we had left behind in the valley, in the terrible noise.
AGAINST FLIGHT Everyone wants to go up—but no one can imagine what it’s like when the earth smoothes out, begins to curve into its own implacable symbol.
LOOKING UP FROM THE PAGE, I AM REMINDED OF THIS MORTAL COIL Mercurial ribbon licking the cut lip of the Blue Ridge— daybreak or end, I can’t tell as long as I ignore the body’s marching orders, as long as I am alive in air . . . What good is the brain without traveling shoes?
April 26, 2017
Many of my favorite collections bundled together in one great book. Dove's poems blend the personal with the historical showing us pivotal moments, injustices endured with courage and intelligence, through the concrete examples from dusting, to cooking, to building zeppelins, to a company picnic to war on the other side of the ocean. Well crafted but what always grabs me by the throat in Dove's poem is the persona, speakers who take us inside the mind whose day to day being is constantly shaping and being shaped by history.
June 23, 2016
This book is a really nice collection of poems which I really enjoyed. All of my favourite Rita Dove poems are in here.
She is a brilliant, earthy poet with a lot of messages woven into her beautiful and elegantly crafted poetry. This is a really great collection which I thoroughly enjoyed.
She is a brilliant, earthy poet with a lot of messages woven into her beautiful and elegantly crafted poetry. This is a really great collection which I thoroughly enjoyed.
January 17, 2017
Rita Dove is a great story-telling poet with a wide range of interests that make for an eclectic and entertaining collected works. I didn't connect with some of the earliest collections, but was glad I stuck with the book--beautiful, insightful writing.
July 6, 2022
Rita Dove has poetry accolades in abundance. After reading this collection it is clear why. I found a great many poems in this collection to be very interesting and unique. Below are some of the poems I specifically liked and some of the key lines that caught my attention. The page numbers are from the Kindle Edition.
From “The Yellow House on the Corner” (1980)
Happenstance (434)
The Snow King (458)
Sightseeing (481)
The Abduction (730)
Notes from a Tunisian Journal (974)
Ö (1129)
This excerpt from Ö really struck me. This is what I love about poetry - the ability to catch one off guard and then make you say, “Oh Yes!”
“Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation. You start out with one thing, end up with another, and nothing’s like it used to be, not even the future.”
From “Museum” (1983)
The Hill Has Something to Say (1213)
Three Days of Forest, a River, Free (1441)
Within this poem I found these lines and immediately thought of how I feel sometimes. I mean Ms. Dove really caught the essence of these mixed feelings in a couple of concentrated lines.
“The terror of waking is a trust drawn out unbearably until nothing, not even love, makes it easier, and yet I love this life”
Delft (1488)
Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove (1521)
To Bed (1715)
Eastern European Eclogues (1860)
Exeunt the Viols (1893)
Lines Muttered in Sleep (1920)
From “Thomas and Beulah” (1986)
Daystar (2644)
From “Grace Notes” (1989)
Summit Beach, 1921 (2921)
Uncle Millet (3089)
II (3132)
Ozone (3185)
Within this poem “Ozone” I really liked these lines from this poem.
“If only we could lose ourselves in the wreckage of the moment! Forget where we stand, dead center, and look up, look up, track a falling star . . . now you see it.” (3204)
Turning Thirty, I Contemplate Students Bicycling Home (3209)
Particulars (3224)
The Wake (3256)
The Other Side of the House (3275)
From the poem “The Other Side of the House” these lines really resonated with me: “Somewhere I learned to walk out of a thought and not snap back the way railroad cars telescope into a train.” (3291) This uniquely described experience is one I have often.
Horse and Tree (3304)
The Breathing, The Endless News (3314)
Dedication (3380)
Ars Poetica (3396)
Arrow (3413)
And Counting (3474)
These lines from “And Counting” ask what I think is the ultimate question: “Here’s a riddle for Our Age: when the sky’s the limit, how can you tell you’ve gone too far?” (3490)
Dialectical Romance (3492)
Canary (3621)
In her poem “Canary,” I read this and it reminded me of something I recently read in a collection of essays by Ursula Le Guin: “Fact is, the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can’t be free, be a mystery.” (3628)
The Island Women of Paris (3631)
From the book “Mother Love” (1995)
In this book Ms. Dove retells the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
Golden Oldie (3964)
Persephone in Hell (4006)
Persephone in Hell (4068)
The Bistro Styx (4265)
Demeter’s Prayer to Hades 4460
Poems I liked from the book, “On the Bus with Rosa Parks” (1999)
Singsong (4775)
The First Book (4832)
Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967 (4847)
Testimonial (4899)
Dawn Revisited (4914)
The Venus of Willendorf (5060)
Against Repose (5238)
Götterdämmerung (5269)
For Sophie, Who’ll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000 (5364)
From the book “American Smooth” (2004)
“I have been a stranger in a strange land” (5607)
Fox Trot Fridays (5630)
Heart to Heart (5710)
Soprano (5752)
Evening Primrose (6673)
Sic Itur Ad Astra (6684)
Driving Through (6743)
Desk Dreams (6806)
Now (6840)
Looking Up from the Page, I Am Reminded of This Mortal Coil (6886)
I will close from a line in this poem: “What good is the brain without traveling shoes?” (6890)
Highly recommended
From “The Yellow House on the Corner” (1980)
Happenstance (434)
The Snow King (458)
Sightseeing (481)
The Abduction (730)
Notes from a Tunisian Journal (974)
Ö (1129)
This excerpt from Ö really struck me. This is what I love about poetry - the ability to catch one off guard and then make you say, “Oh Yes!”
“Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation. You start out with one thing, end up with another, and nothing’s like it used to be, not even the future.”
From “Museum” (1983)
The Hill Has Something to Say (1213)
Three Days of Forest, a River, Free (1441)
Within this poem I found these lines and immediately thought of how I feel sometimes. I mean Ms. Dove really caught the essence of these mixed feelings in a couple of concentrated lines.
“The terror of waking is a trust drawn out unbearably until nothing, not even love, makes it easier, and yet I love this life”
Delft (1488)
Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove (1521)
To Bed (1715)
Eastern European Eclogues (1860)
Exeunt the Viols (1893)
Lines Muttered in Sleep (1920)
From “Thomas and Beulah” (1986)
Daystar (2644)
From “Grace Notes” (1989)
Summit Beach, 1921 (2921)
Uncle Millet (3089)
II (3132)
Ozone (3185)
Within this poem “Ozone” I really liked these lines from this poem.
“If only we could lose ourselves in the wreckage of the moment! Forget where we stand, dead center, and look up, look up, track a falling star . . . now you see it.” (3204)
Turning Thirty, I Contemplate Students Bicycling Home (3209)
Particulars (3224)
The Wake (3256)
The Other Side of the House (3275)
From the poem “The Other Side of the House” these lines really resonated with me: “Somewhere I learned to walk out of a thought and not snap back the way railroad cars telescope into a train.” (3291) This uniquely described experience is one I have often.
Horse and Tree (3304)
The Breathing, The Endless News (3314)
Dedication (3380)
Ars Poetica (3396)
Arrow (3413)
And Counting (3474)
These lines from “And Counting” ask what I think is the ultimate question: “Here’s a riddle for Our Age: when the sky’s the limit, how can you tell you’ve gone too far?” (3490)
Dialectical Romance (3492)
Canary (3621)
In her poem “Canary,” I read this and it reminded me of something I recently read in a collection of essays by Ursula Le Guin: “Fact is, the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can’t be free, be a mystery.” (3628)
The Island Women of Paris (3631)
From the book “Mother Love” (1995)
In this book Ms. Dove retells the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
Golden Oldie (3964)
Persephone in Hell (4006)
Persephone in Hell (4068)
The Bistro Styx (4265)
Demeter’s Prayer to Hades 4460
Poems I liked from the book, “On the Bus with Rosa Parks” (1999)
Singsong (4775)
The First Book (4832)
Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967 (4847)
Testimonial (4899)
Dawn Revisited (4914)
The Venus of Willendorf (5060)
Against Repose (5238)
Götterdämmerung (5269)
For Sophie, Who’ll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000 (5364)
From the book “American Smooth” (2004)
“I have been a stranger in a strange land” (5607)
Fox Trot Fridays (5630)
Heart to Heart (5710)
Soprano (5752)
Evening Primrose (6673)
Sic Itur Ad Astra (6684)
Driving Through (6743)
Desk Dreams (6806)
Now (6840)
Looking Up from the Page, I Am Reminded of This Mortal Coil (6886)
I will close from a line in this poem: “What good is the brain without traveling shoes?” (6890)
Highly recommended
June 21, 2020
Since this is a collection, my rating is an amalgamation of all the books therein. Mother Love is my favorite, and were I rating that one on its own, my rating would be 4 stars.
I'm ashamed to say I had never heard of Rita Dove before happening upon this volume on my library's ebook site. It's taken me almost 3 weeks to read through the whole thing, and I know that my read has been on the shallow side—this is my first time becoming acquainted with Rita Dove, and I expect to return to her works later on in more depth.
I'm ashamed to say I had never heard of Rita Dove before happening upon this volume on my library's ebook site. It's taken me almost 3 weeks to read through the whole thing, and I know that my read has been on the shallow side—this is my first time becoming acquainted with Rita Dove, and I expect to return to her works later on in more depth.
January 18, 2021
I can't quite remember what led me to pick up this collection, but I must have read one of Rita Doves poems somewhere and really liked it. Sadly, this wasn't the case for most of the poems in this collection (mostly because I'm not hugely into narrative poems). There were a handful I really liked, and I liked the overall experience of reading this collection, but most of the poems just were not for me.
March 27, 2018
This is a great collection of work. I felt like I understood more of these then I have in the last couple of poetry books I've read, but that could be because there are so many more poems in this collection. I especially like the set that were from the point of view of the man and then the woman and the whole bunch that were inspired by the Persephone myth.
August 24, 2021
I tried. I really did. My lack of enthusiasm is not due to lack of greatness in Rita Dove. I am just not a poetry person. When I heard her read a selection of her work on NPR, it was magical. I just can’t figure out how to capture that magic through reading. Maybe if I took her class when I had the chance all those years ago?
December 29, 2023
Absolutely adored some of the installments in this collection; others left me cold. While certain of her poems felt needlessly opaque, I particularly enjoyed her reflections on life as an American in Europe. "Mother Love," her series of poems inspired by the myth of Persephone and Demeter, was one of my favorite storylines.
October 4, 2020
I don't read much poetry. Ms. Dove's style is not like any poetry I've encountered. It's more like story-telling, with chapters, that led me along. My favorite section was about Thomas and Beulah and their lives, seen from each of their points of view.
March 15, 2022
This may possibly be the best poetry book I’ve ever read. It’s inspired me to take more observation of the world around me and write poetry whenever it comes to me, something I fell out of habit to do a long time ago.
August 8, 2018
What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk;
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk;
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.
April 14, 2023
Did not enjoy. Especially once I saw the N-word
November 8, 2023
This collection lets you see the range of Rita Dove's poetry.
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February 19, 2024This is quite heavy.
April 8, 2024
Not a huge poetry fan, especially when reading 50 poems in one sitting, but Rita Dove tells stories and it's so wonderfully captivating.
December 18, 2016
Rita Dove Collected Poems 1974-2004 is a treasure trove of Dove's work published between 1974 and 2004. The poems are a journey through Dove's life as well as the world. There are moments that transport the reader into the past to explore how the present came to be and leave the reader conjecturing what the future might bring. Dove's words remind the reader how interconnected the world in which we live is as well as how our differences have the power to either unite us or divide us. Dove explores love, family, politics, culture, history, and self-discovery among other topics in this diverse and yet cohesive collection of poems. I took my time reading these poems often taking a day or so to reflect on what I'd read. Dove's poetry is inspiring and honest in a way that made me think about life, writing, and my place in the world.
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July 25, 2016811.54 D743c 2016
September 9, 2016
3 1/2stars
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November 29, 2016Find it at UCI Libraries: http://antpac.lib.uci.edu:80/record=b...
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