ŷ������

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 , ��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.
�����dz�

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 —���I help those who can’t help themselves, / I do what needs to be done�� she writes in —o�� 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 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 . 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 , ��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 (titled after the last cycle of ’s epic musical drama ) 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.