Customer Reviews

Selected Poems

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Rita Dove's poetry is challenging: lyric, attentive, sure; yet it works in quieter veins than many more exhibitionist poets of the past thirty years. In the volumes collected in this "Selected Poems" Dove explores race, domesticity, history. The single most impressive featis her collection *Thomas and Beulah* which consists of two long sets of lyric poems which, combined, narrate a story (of her grandparents, the Thomas and Beulah of the title) and create a drama -- since the way in which Thomas sees things, in his half of the volume, is utterly different from the way in which Beulah sees things. What is most surprising is how these two people can live together, but in such different worlds. Ther is both strength and delicacy in these poems, and Beulah in particular emerges as one of the more significant figures in contempoary literature.

(Dove's more recent works are also rich, and her "Mother Love" continues to explore, in a new way, the richness of family in America -- this time through a series of inventive sonnets, no two of which use the same sonnet form.)

What I love about Rita Dove's work is that she gives her poems a sense of narrative. It's easy to see why when you consider her background in writing fiction. She is influenced by her desire to give her poetry a self contained atmosphere that you see in fiction. I disagree with readers who think of her work as too cryptic. You really can't expect to fully understand her poems in one reading. You have to stand back (in a way) and think about her imagery and its connection to the narrative (best example to see this would be her work from Thomas and Beulah - which won the Pulitzer).I would recommend also reading "Conversations with Rita Dove" where she gives insight into how she approaches writing poetry and fiction.

I have all the respect in the world for Rita Dove--she is probably the most active Poet Laureate we have ever had, and I love her ideas, but this poetry is just unreadable--inaccessible and coded.

Ms. Dove has been praised to the skies for her poetic vision, but one wonders just how far she would have gotten had she not emerged in the 1980s at the beginning of the Political Correctness Era (which continues to this day). Her writing is calculated for the highest drama, but hardly rises above the mundane ... and the fact is, she is no longer part of a generation of African Americans who have suffered at the hands of white civilization. She's wealthy, articulate ... and I didn't believe the suffering in these poems. Like a lot of Iowa City MFA graduates, she's like a fabulously muscled strongman in a gym lifting little tiny weights and making a lot of noise doing so. I'm done with Political Correctness, I'm done with Rita Dove.