Selected Poems of Rita Dove Paperback - 1993

From the jacket flap

Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents' lives. Precisely yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove's Selected Poems is marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling.

Excerpt

The Secret Garden

I was ill, lying on my bed of old papers,
when you came with white rabbits in your arms;
and the doves scattered upwards, flying to mothers,
and the snails sighed under their baggage of stone . . .

Now your tongue grows like celery between us;
Because of our love-cries, cabbage darkens in its nest;
the cauliflower thinks of her pale, plump children
and turns greenish-white in a light like the ocean's.

I was sick, fainting in the smell of teabags,
when you came with tomatoes, a good poetry.
I am being wooed.  I am being conquered
by a cliff of limestone that leaves chalk on my breasts.

Media reviews

"Remarkable . . . a poet of dramatic force." --The New York Review of Books

"Consistently accomplished . . . Dove's is a brilliant mind that seeks for itself the widest possible play, an ever-expanding range of reference, the most acute distinctions, and the most subtle shadings of meaning. . . . Her is a major career." --Arnold Rampersad, Callaloo

"Dove's poems, rich with elegant phrasing and Southern spice, blast tradition by pulling readers into other lives and then dazzle them with an often startling mastery of language." --Boston Globe

"Rita Dove . . . is a devoted and subtle storyteller [whose] gifts are evoking, and sometimes exalting, the everyday moments we live by but may neglect or forget, the music of her words issuing a message of uncanny integrity and calm.  Though often writing of private experience (mothering, mourning death, watching rain), she never seems to lose sight of the world beyond." --Newsweek

Citations

• Booklist, 10/15/1993, Page 412
• Library Journal, 04/01/1997, Page 94