Product Description
Calling upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Mother Love examines the love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter, each daughter a potential mother. Author readings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

America's Poet Laureate!
Rita Dove is not as well-known as Nikki Giovanni or Maya Angelou but she is one of the more accomplished female poets and African Americans of this generation. Her poetry is often simple at times but there are several levels and new information is given regarding her poetry. In this book, she calls upon the ancient Greeks and examines the love between mother and daughter. The poems' settings are as various as Arizona and the streets of Paris and Mexican pyramids. Rita Dove's love of poetry comes through in her work and she should be better known to today's readers.

Best african American female Poet
Rita Dove book, Mother Loves: Poems, Is one of the best book I've ever read. Its so lovely, and eligant. Thank You. ... Read more

Amazon.com Review
The poems in this unusual book tell a story,forming a narrativealmost like a realistic novel. Read in sequence as intended, they tell of thelives of a married black couple (not unlike Dove's own grandparents) from theearly part of the century until their deaths in the 1960s, a period thatspans the great migration of blacks from rural south to urban north. But thisis merely the social backdrop to the story of a marriage. Two separatesequences offer two views of the couple's lives: the first,"Mandolin," consists of 23 poems giving Thomas's side, and"Canary in Bloom" gives Beulah's in 21 poems. Together they paint adetailed, poetically dense portrait of two lives in all their frailty,dignity and complexity. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize forpoetry in 1987. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Fabulous.
Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah (1987, Carnegie Mellon)

Rita Dove won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with Thomas and Beulah, and it's pretty easy to see why. Dove's poetic biography of her ancestors is hyperkinetic, jazz-infused poetry rooted in the Depression, full of life, sass, and vinegar. Nothing is sacred, from motherhood ("She dreams the baby's so small she keeps/misplacing it") to death ("Later he'll say Death stepped right up/to shake his hand, then squeezed/until he sank to his knees."), and some contemporary jabs mixed in ("...Joanna saying/'Mother, we're Afro-Americans now!'/What did she know about Africa?"). Dove has been one of America's shining poetic voices for two decades now, and there's never not a right time to go back and revisit this stunning collection. Perhaps her strongest work. ****

Different Views
The collected poems of Rita Dove in the book "Thomas and Beulah" are about the lives of 2 people.These poems also tell two sides of a story.Rita Dove is a 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.This book of poems is refreshingly different and I strongly recommend it.This book tells a story with these poems.Everything is in sequence from the 1900's, which is when Thomas and Beulah were born, to the 1960's when Beulah passes on.This book tells the lives of a married black couple back in the day.And is separated by "Mandolin", which is Thomas' side, then "Canary in Bloom", which is Beulah's side of the story.
An example of what both people think about the same situation is in the poem "Courtship" on Thomas' side.This is when he wants to please her and so he "warps the yellow silk still warm from his throat around her shoulders (he mad good money; he could buy another.)"On the other side though of what Beulah is feeling in "Courtship, Diligence" is that all she sees is " a yellow scarf run[ing] though his fingers" she also says that "she'd much prefer a scent in a sky-colored flask" and "not that scarf, bright as butter."With that, you can clearly see how the two people are feeling.Thomas is thinking the yellow scarf is something expensive of his that he can give, and Beulah doesn't like it.You have two sides of a story and what each person is feeling and thinking.Through out the book it is the same from.From Thomas' death and how he was feeling then and what Beulah was thinking and feeling at that time too.This book is like a balance between two people.A balance needed for a marriage and it shows the complexity of two lives that see each other and the world in two different ways.
But there is also a closeness that the reader gets because this book draws them in from the realistic situations.In example, from the poem "Variation on Guilt", Beulah is having a baby and he really wants a baby boy.He's scared to find out what she will have and when the doctor comes out and sees a "smirk" on his face he knows it's a girl and "he doesn't feel a thing" but is "weak with rage."This book is really interesting because you can go into the lives of the married couple and know more about their feelings and emotions than what Thomas and Beulah know about each other.Their relationship and building a family is sometimes complex, simple, yet it is still only a shallow view of their lives.From beginning to end this book always keeps you interested.And with the description of how each person had passed away and their experiences brings the reader a little bit closer to them.

Wonderful book
Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah is a fantastic story of two people's journey through life together.It is broken up into two sections: Mandolin, and Canary in Bloom.The first section is written through the eyes of Thomas and the second is from Beulah's perspective.What is fantastic about the way this book is written and organized is that all the poems are connected in sequence and tell a story.Unlike many of the books of poetry that I have read, I did not have to bounce back and forth from this book to my dictionary.Dove's approach to writing poetry is very straight-forward and from the heart.The book reads as if it was a personal memoir from both Thomas and Beulah.

You can relate to the couple and really are drawn in by the imagery and metaphors that Dove uses.Pay attention to the use of wings, salt, fish, canary, feet, heart, music, yellow, flowers, and tears.All contribute in great deal to the depth of each poem.One of my favorite poems from this book is "Courtship, Diligence."In this poem, Beulah is listening to him play the same old mandolin that he has played for years.As she sits she imagines a life where she doesn't have to listen to the same old mandolin and see his same old yellow scarf.Thomas has no idea of her thoughts and is playing as well as he could to make her happy. This really made me think of past relationships and how one person could be very happy and try their best to please the one they love with what they are given.Yet, sometimes no matter how hard one person tries, the other is just simply unhappy.The use of mandolin in this poem is just one example of Dove's imagery.When she is using mandolin, it is representing some feeling or stage in Thomas' life.Whether young and recalling memories, anxious in new love, or old and recovering from a heart attack, the mandolin is an intricate imagery tool.Another fantastic poem is "Variation on Pain."This poem draws back memories of slavery when African Americans were forced to have their ears pierced.The mandolin is again used in this poem, and it draws forth these memories of "two greased strings for each pierced lobe."The third stanza, however, is the most powerful."There was a needle in his head but nothing fit through it.Sound quivered like a rope stretched clear to land, tensed and brimming, a man gurgling air."This is one of the finest examples of the eloquent power that Rita Dove expresses in her writing.

All in all, this is one of the best written works of poetry that I have come across.It is an easy read and as far as books of poetry go, its progressing story makes Thomas and Beulah a real page turner. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is just getting in to reading poetry or even someone who is a poetry connoisseur.

Fantastic work of poetry
Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah was a fantastic story of two people's journey through life together.It is broken up into two sections: Mandolin, and Canary in Bloom.The first section is written through the eyes of Thomas and the second is from Beulah's perspective.What is fantastic about the way this book is written and organized is that all the poems are connected in sequence and tell a story.Unlike many of the books of poetry that I have read, I did not have to bounce back and forth from this book to my dictionary.Dove's approach to writing poetry is very straight-forward and from the heart.The book reads as if it was a personal memoir from both Thomas and Beulah.

You can relate to the couple and really are drawn in by the imagery and metaphors that Dove uses.Pay attention to the use of wings, salt, fish, canary, feet, heart, music, yellow, flowers, and tears.All contribute in great deal to the depth of each poem.One of my favorite poems from this book is "Courtship, Diligence."In this poem, Beulah is listening to him play the same old mandolin that he has played for years.As she sits she imagines a life where she doesn't have to listen to the same old mandolin and see his same old yellow scarf.Thomas has no idea of her thoughts and is playing as well as he could to make her happy. This really made me think of past relationships and how one person could be very happy and try their best to please the one they love with what they are given.Yet, sometimes no matter how hard one person tries, the other is just simply unhappy.The use of mandolin in this poem is just one example of Dove's imagery.When she is using mandolin, it is representing some feeling or stage in Thomas' life.Whether young and recalling memories, anxious in new love, or old and recovering from a heart attack, the mandolin is an intricate imagery tool.Another fantastic poem is "Variation on Pain."This poem draws back memories of slavery when African Americans were forced to have their ears pierced.The mandolin is again used in this poem, and it draws forth these memories of "two greased strings for each pierced lobe."The third stanza, however, is the most powerful."There was a needle in his head but nothing fit through it.Sound quivered like a rope stretched clear to land, tensed and brimming, a man gurgling air."This is one of the finest examples of the eloquent power that Rita Dove expresses in her writing.

All in all, this is one of the best written works of poetry that I have come across.It is an easy read and as far as books of poetry go, its progressing story makes Thomas and Beulah a real page turner. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is just getting in to reading poetry or even someone who is a poetry connoisseur.

Excellent Read
I really enjoyed this book because of the unconventional way it was written.I really admire Rita Dove's use of a series of short poems to tell a story.After reading Thomas's half of the book, I couldn't wait to read Beulah's half.The different ways that these two experience the same events, is wonderful.Every poem shows so much feeling; it makes the reader feel like part of what is going on.Once it was pointed out to me that certain symbols stay constant through the entire book, I appreciated the way it was written even more. It gives the reader something to grab onto and follow throughout the sets of narrative poems.In the poems, there is not a use of extremely difficult language.Instead, Rita Dove uses very simple language. The use of simpler words helps convey the time the events were taking place and the people whose point of view they are coming from.By this I mean that historically, because of racism, during these time period many African Americans where not even allowed an education.My favorite poem in the book would have to be "The Zeppelin Factory."In the first stanza, I love the use of the term "whale" to describe the air craft.It gives the image of this gigantic, lumbering piece of machinery.To me it also relates the hollow moan of a whale, to the moaning and creaking of the joints of the airship.The feelings of sadness in the first stanza, quickly translates to the second and third stanzas, as the airship floats out of control, and three people lose their lives.In the third stanza, the image of these tiny looking men falling is absolutely horrifying.It made me realize that I can't even imagine witnessing something so terrible.It made me feel sorry for Thomas, because he didn't even want to be part of the airship in the first place, when he had to work on it, and now he had to witness this depressing event.In the fourth stanza, the reader gets a glimpse into Thomas's feelings of the event.He seems to have feelings of guilt because he did not lose his life that day.The last stanza brings you back to now, with Thomas looking at a Goodyear blimp.When reading this poem, I experienced so many feelings, and so many images ran through my head. The poem just gave mea feeling of guilt, much like Thomas had in the fourth stanza of the poem.This one poem is a great example of how heartfelt and emotional, some of the other poems in the book are.I don't want to give the idea that the entire book is depressing.There are many poems that are lighthearted and will bring a smile right to the readers face.Even though these poems are written about events in a different era, the reader can relate many times throughout the book to the feelings and thoughts going through Thomas and Beulah's head.I would recommend this book to anyone.It is a short read that is definitely worth every second spent reading it. ... Read more

Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Rita Dove has a strong sense for narrative
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 like her personally, though...
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.

Wonderful poems
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.)

A rather uninspired collection
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 thisday). Her writing is calculated for the highest drama, but hardly risesabove the mundane ... and the fact is, she is no longer part of ageneration of African Americans who have suffered at the hands of whitecivilization. She's wealthy, articulate ... and I didn't believe thesuffering in these poems. Like a lot of Iowa City MFA graduates, she's likea fabulously muscled strongman in a gym lifting little tiny weights andmaking a lot of noise doing so. I'm done with Political Correctness, I'mdone with Rita Dove. ... Read more

Product Description
Detailing the volatile relationship between the black violinist George Bridgetower and Beethoven, this is a "masterful collection" (Los Angeles Times).The son of a white woman and an “African Prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860) travels to Vienna to meet “bad-boy” genius Ludwig van Beethoven. The great composer’s subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto, but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale.A New Yorker's A Year's Reading; Booklist Editors Choice Award. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

An elegant and charming set of poems
Having seen Rita Dove recently at the Downtown library in Los Angeles, I was determined to purchase her latest volume, Sonata Mulattica. This is a most unusual set of poems, including a small play! There is nothing forbidding about Dove's poems. She reaches her reader with every word.It is not surprising that she has been a Poet Laureate This is a most appealing work, even for those not familiar with poetry. I appreciated receiving a used copy through Amazon. It was in "as new" condition, pristine - and about half the price of buying it at the bookstore. As a writer, myself, I sometimes feel a bit guilty about buying at such a discount. The writer gets so little from books, anyway, and when books are sold at deep discounts, the writer often gets nothing at all.

Still, for those of us who love books, Amazon offers additions to our personal libraries that we could not otherwise afford, would not otherwise buy.

Monica B. Morris

A great poet and a great work of poetry!
This latest book from one-time U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove is a labor of love. Known for the musicality of her own work and poems, Rita Dove takes on as her subject a musical prodigy, violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780-1860). A peer of Beethoven, Bridgetower sets himself apart as an exceptional violinist, especially remarkable to his audiences at the time because of his brown skin--just one part of his inheritance from his "African prince" of a father.

Rita Dove delves into just about every aspect of Bridgetower's public and private life and reveals each one to us through exhaustive poems and through the words of different narrators. The poems in this volume channel the voices and intimate perspectives of Bridgetower, his father, his musical contemporaries, and those who came in contact with him and had something to say, good or bad.

Rita Dove's book is a commentary on race relations in Europe two centuries ago.However, her book is very relevant today, in a world that is slow to change--a world that is still inexplicably surprised (shocked) by the beauty and talents of the brown-skinned individual. This book testifies that great gifts, visible or invisible, are to be expected in all individuals, regardless of skin color, ethnicity, or nationality.

Reviewed by
Viola Allo

beautiful symphony of poetry
I love this book. I played symphony violin for 9 years and I truly appreciate the extensive research Rita Dove has done to make the book musically oriented.The book also employs preics terminiology to paint the picture of that time period.While some parts are a bit dense, the overall flow from poem to poem is beautiful music, plain and simple.

How does a shadow shine?
Having read so many novels recently written with the sensibility of a poet, I was curious to see what former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove would make of this cycle of 85 poems that together take the form of a novel. A biographical novel about a footnote to musical history: the mulatto violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower. Beethoven (who ought to know) called him a crazy genius ("gran pazzo") and was inspired to write him his most difficult violin sonata. But the two quarreled over a girl and, in a fit of pique, Beethoven rededicated the work now known as the KREUTZER SONATA.

So we have a real-life story, or at least some outlines for the writer to fill in. George's father was a self-styled African Prince brought to the Austro-Hungarian court as part, frankly, of a human menagerie; gifted in many languages, he seems to have had an instinctive nose for that touch of exotic wildness that would secure his place in European society. George's mother was a German woman of Polish descent. George himself, as a boy on the Esterhazy estate, comes to the notice of Joseph Haydn, who develops his musical talents to the point where he creates a sensation at his Paris debut at the age of 9, and thereafter gets adopted by the English court. He is 23 when he visits Vienna, enthralls Beethoven then maddens him, and returns in defeat to England; there, he will serve for 20 years as leader of the Prince Regent's orchestra, wander abroad, and return to die in a London suburb at the end of his eighth decade.

It is a rocket of a story with a long dying fall. Poetry doesn't narrate the upward trajectory -- for that you need the chronology and racy notes at the back -- so much as punctuate the ascent with starbursts of wonder: "I was nothing if not everything | when the music was in me. | I could be fierce, I could shred | the heads off flowers for breakfast | with my bare teeth, simply because | I deserved such loveliness." But poetry excels prose in its ability to meditate on those plotless later years. Some poems cry out in anger, as here in RAIN when George takes leave of the cultural cacophony of Vienna: "Because we're wading through wreckage, we're | not even listening to all the crash and clatter -- | chords wrenched from their moorings, smashed | etudes, arpeggios glistening as they heave and sink. | Ciphers, the lot of them. Their money, their perfumed stink." Others are almost unbearably poignant, as in HALF LIFE: I'm a shadow in sunlight, | unable to blush | or whiten in winter. | Beautiful monster, | where to next -- | when you can hear | the wind howl | behind you, the gate | creaking shut?"

This reference to George Bridgetower's race is of course of interest to Dove, who is of African descent herself. But despite the title, SONATA MULATTICA is about many sorts of ways of reducing a person's individuality, even while feting him for some extraordinary success. There is little difference between the prodigy George, his African showman of a father, or the real life negro busker Black Billy Waters, who makes several ribald appearances. Even the great Haydn chafes at being treated like a chattel. Here is George at 9, in recital with another child prodigy: "Two rag dolls set out for tea | in our smart red waistcoats, | we suffered their delight, | we did not fail our parts -- | not as boys nor rivals even | but men: broken, then improperly | mended; abandoned | far beyond the province | of the innocent."

I would mention three other things that poetry does extremely well. One is to play with form and style. Dove's range is extremely wide, taking in sonnet and rondeau, popular nursery rhymes and street songs, many types of free verse, some concrete poetry, and even a short verse play. The effect, as she skips from the 18th century to the 21st and back, is rather like what Peter Maxwell Davies does with popular music in his brilliant EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING, simultaneously capturing the period and anatomizing it. But poetry and music are indeed close; that is my second point. Poems like POLGREEN SIGHT-READING, in which the violinist, half by sheer intuition, struggles with Beethoven's manuscript are amazing evocations of the extraordinary in music: "I've been destined to travel these impossible | switchbacks, but it's as if I'm skating | on his heart, blood tracks | looping everywhere...". Finally, poetry can be intensely personal. One of the most moving poems of all is the last, THE END, WITH MAPQUEST, where Dove comes back to visit the very ordinary suburb where Bridgetower died, ending with a confession: "Do I care enough, George Augustus Bridgetower, | to miss you? I don't even know if I really like you. | I don't know if your playing was truly gorgeous | or if it was just you, the sheer miracle of all | that darkness swaying close enough to touch, | palm tree and Sambo and glistening tiger | running circles into golden oil. Ah, | Master B, little great man, tell me: | How does a shadow shine?"

A masterpiece!
I was blown away by this -- for poetry rather voluminous -- collection. Rita Dove manages to bring to life surprising aspects of a vibrant and untidy Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, in the process setting the record straight on a famous musical composition (the so-called "Kreutzer" Sonata). The story of George Bridgetower and his all but forgotten, but no less influential encounter with Ludwig van Beethoven has been summarized elsewhere on this page. What's so amazing about this story is not only the apparent ease and success with which a mixed-race violinist -- black father, white mother -- could move about in the high societies of Paris, London and Vienna 200 years before Barack Obama, but the ingenious art of shifting perspectives Dove employs in her sometimes narrative, sometimes lyrical, always beautifully crafted poems. Here, the author easily surpasses her Pulitzer Prize-honored volume Thomas and Beulah; while Thomas and Beulah was more like a novella, Sonata Mulattica is a full-blown novel in verse (with a hilarious farce in the middle).

I'd go out on a limb and say that together with Allen Ginsberg's Howl, much of Sylvia Plath, James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, Derek Walcott's Omeros and many Seamus Heaney poems, Rita Dove's masterpiece comprises the greatest accomplishment in English language poetry since Auden and Eliot. One can only hope that the jurors of this year's major literary awards (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize) will also recognize this. And isn't it about time for a female American poet to be honored by the Swedish Academy? ... Read more

Product Description
The Darker Face of the Earth, a play by the poet laureate of the United States, creates a human drama of classical proportions. Behind the facade of antebellum Southern plantation life unfolds a mysterious tale of interracial love and strife, guilt and suffering, as both slave and master struggle against a fate that threatens to eclipse them altogether. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Darker Face of the Earth
Rita Dove's poetry permeates this remarkable new play which uses the Oedipal myth as a structural device as well as a means to enter the world of human slavery as practiced in South Carolina circa 1829-1840.Centralto the story is the unusual and compelling relationship between theplantation owner, Amalia Jennings, and her newly acquired revolutionaryslave, Augustus Newcastle.Unlike the other slaves who collectivelyfunction as the Greek chorus, Augustus can read and write, thus making himnot only dangerous but attractive to the high spirited Amalia.Greekmythology aside, THE DARKER FACE OF THE EARTH is a challenging play notonly for the reader but for potential producers.But it is well worth thechallenge.It is rare that depictions of the conditions of slavery arerevealed by 1) an African American, 2) a woman, 3) a poet, and 4) a masterstoryteller. ... Read more

Product Description
"Rita Dove pulls the ultimate dance trick: she makes it look easy."--New York Times Book ReviewAn occasion to celebrate: a new collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate; her first since On the Bus with Rosa Parks. With the grace of an Astaire, Rita Dove's magnificent poems pay homage to our kaleidoscopic cultural heritage; from the glorious shimmer of an operatic soprano to Bessie Smith's mournful wail; from paradise lost to angel food cake; from hotshots at the local shooting range to the Negro jazz band in World War I whose music conquered Europe before the Allied advance. Like the ballroom-dancing couple of the title poem, smiling and making the difficult seem effortless, Dove explores the shifting surfaces between perception and intimation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Dance in American Smooth
American Smooth by Rita Dove is as imaginative and lyrical as its name. From the very beginning, the reader learns that American Smooth is a dance form then soon finds that the poems emulate dance in lyrical form. For example title poem "American Smooth" has a rhythm that rises and falls like dancers. The poem expresses the confines of the dancers in traditional dance forms to keep together and maintain frame. This is contrasted to the freedom that is found in American Smooth, a dance for that promotes improvisation and individual expression, which allows the dancer to "achieve flight" before the judgment of others makes the her return to earth. The poem expresses the universal want of individualism with the fear of the judgment of others that often hinders unique expression.
The section "Not Welcome Here" gives a voice to the African-American soldiers in World War I.The poems are artfully crafted, but they make the reader wonder how Dove has so much experience with a war that was fought before she was born. The notes to the text indicate that she has read several books about the war; however, the emotions and experience would be much different when reading about a war ninety years later than living or fighting in that time.
Other themes expressed in the poetry are jazz music, childhood memories, love and regret. A personal favorite is the poem "Brown" where Dove expresses a love for her skin color. It begins by a dress maker exclaiming that the speaker looks good in every color. Again, there is reference to dance because the speaker is at a ball in a country club. The speaker expresses her love of the way that her brown skin glows against fuchsia and citron dresses and her desire to make a grand entrance. One again Dove is exploring the desire to be an individual in the midst of a culture that prizes conformity.

No wonder she was Poet Laureate!
If ever there were the slightest doubt as to why Rita Dove is a former Poet Laureate, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and lots of other great things for a poet (particularly a poet these days!) to be, AMERICAN SMOOTH squelches that doubt like a bug at a barbecue.Whether she's writing of Negro doughboys in World War One as they face the issue of Race, along with the other horrors of war, or Salome or Saint Valentine, her pen celebrates her subject with subtle wit and with the incising scalpel-like insight which is the core of the Poet's craft.For this reviewer, the best poems here are those that deal with jazz and dance themes and skillfully utilize those rhythms.The poem about Hattie McDaniel (Mammy from Gone with the Wind) going to her Oscar party is also an absolute delight.Dove's exquisite and perspicacious wit also shines in her selection of quotes from Star Trek: Voyager's clever and charming Vulcan, Tuvok as section epigraphs.While Dove's voice is her own, careful listening and reading will reveal echoes of Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and William Carlos Williams.

Rita Dove is Ok
The book was ok it wasn't the best book i've ever read. I would say the book can put you to sleep a little. Most of the poems are good but if you are a teenage girl you wouldn't like the book. She could have did a better job with her description and characteristics. But throughout the book she just talked like she was in the olden days and it's 2006 she needs to write like it's 2006. Kids might get bored off of her book I know I did. Although I didn't like the book personally others might like it so just read it and you well see.

Rita Dove is Ok
The book was ok it wasn't the best book i've evr read. I would say the book can put you to sleep a little. Most of the poems are good but if yo are a teenage girl you wouldn't like the book. She could have did a better job with her description and characteristics. But throughout the book she just talked like she was in the olden days and it's 2006 she needs to write like it's 2006. Kids might get bored off of her book i know i did. Although i didn't like the book personally others might like it so just read it and you well see.

The Sweetest Word
Rita Dove is a highly acclaimed poet and a former Poet Laureate of the United States with many accolades and honors.Her latest publication, AMERICAN SMOOTH, is a collection of forty-four poems infused with the history of World War I, the enjoyment of dancing, and issues of everyday life.

My favorite selections are "Meditation at Fifty Yards, Moving Target", which makes shooting a gun sound so poetic and "Heart to Heart" which downplays the myths one associates with the heart (shape and color), and all the cliches individuals use in terms of it (from the bottom of my heart), and breaks down what it really is (muscle) and what people need to keep it going (love).

Although I was not able to enjoy the collection in it's entirety, I enjoyed several of the poetic offerings similar to those mentioned above.Those that I did not identify with were well written, its just that I was not able to relate to those pieces, but that is the beauty of poetry, there is something for everyone.

Reviewed by Aiesha Flowers
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Essential Theatre will Produce this Play July 2010
An incredibly creative retelling of the Oedipus myth retold on a slave plantation. Wonderfully produced at Oregon Shakespeare, Essential Theatre's Atlanta Festival of New Plays will produce this play July 2010. [...]

The Darker Face of the Earth
The Darker Face of the Earth is a wonderful book.It keeps the reader on the edge of his seat.The play is based on the well know Greek story of Oedipus, so it makes the story easier to follow for the reader.Even though you know what will happen in the end of the story it is still surprisingly suspenseful.There are many more actions in this play that lead up to the conclusion than in Oedipus, which adds to the enjoyment of reading this book.The Darker Face of the Earth is an excellent mix of the tangles of a mother and son caught in their sins, and the hardships of slavery.The play is a quick read and I recommend it to anyone who has a free hour or two, because once you start reading this book you will not be able to put it down.

A review of the play that also recommends the book
Rita Dove's poetry won her a Pulitzer in her mid-thirties; she went on to became the youngest (and first African-American) Poet Laureate of the United States. It should not be surprising, then, that her first venture into playwriting has produced an enormously powerful and beautiful work. The themes are intricate, the main characters full-bodied and the language -- oh, the language -- nothing short of stunning. What is surprising is that, with all of the above and with a premise that could easily lend itself to parodic or pretentious treatment, she has produced a play that imitates nothing, never takes itself too seriously and expresses itself (dare I say despite its monumental lyricism?) with clarity. Above is from Les Gutman's monthly report from DC wherethe play is currently running in Washington.And here, for Amazon.com customers, his final paragraph: While most plays are probably better seen than read, I'm inclined to think this one may be a good one to enjoy on the page as well. The poetryis too good to experience only in passing. I am ordering an inexpensive copy of it.To read his whole review and check out the many other features at CurtainUp, the New York City based Internet magazine of theater reviews and related features. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Joining Rita's Bus
This collection of poems is a fun variety of rhythm, imagery and humour. I found this collection a great daily read.

The first set of poems, "Cameos" are wonderful snapshots of the African American community. Dove does something that is very difficult and takes on the voice of different generations and genders in the same family to let us see inside the group. July 1925 had a great story. "Night" had a great rhythm and "Lake Erie" had wonderful unusual imagery.

As the collection progresses we move to more stand alone poems but they are all there to create new voices. She does what a good poet wants and takes a common theme and makes it new. A perfect example is "Parlor." We are dealing with death but with a bit of humour in the background.

The later poems are from a series on civil rights and Rosa Parks and are just as intriguing as the earlier voices, the views of a culture different from my own.

I took away from this collection that it was not a book about civil rights as so many thought from the title. But that it is a book about "Riding the Bus with Rosa Parks" in the sense that the African American community, especially the female sector, want to join that tradition and to honor what it means to be a part of the sector of the community.

If you want to read a very talented poet then I strongly suggest this collection. As noted, it isn't a collection soley focusing on civil rights. It is an anthology of unique voices.

Don't judge a book by its title...
At first glance, one may think this book to be a collection of poems dealing with the civil rights movement.Dove illustrates her poetic talent, however, by writing about the struggles in the lives of her fictional characters.In fact, the only references to Rosa Parks are in the chapter named after the book itself.But by looking beneath the surface of Dove's poems, it becomes clear to the reader why "On the Bus With Rosa Parks" is a very appropriate title.Rita Dove uses Rosa Parks as a sort of personification of the recurring themes in the poems.Rosa Parks represents hope, living life to its fullest, and the idea of ordinary people overcoming adversity to do something extraordinary. It's wrong to downplay this work and say Dove was too young to accurately illustrate Rosa Parks' effect on the Civil Rights Movement.For one thing, I think we all know of her significance, no matter what age or race we are.But also, a reader of this book needs to look past the title and see that this is not just about Rosa Parks, it outlines *human* struggle, not just African American struggle.I highly recommend it...

not her best work
having read rita dove's selected poems, i know she has written good poems (the adolescence poems, in the old neighborhood, the thomas and beuleh poems), but these poems don't have the same quality of her previous works. the poems in this collection don't have the narrative quality that made thomas and beuleh so good. the cameo sequence of poems is simply a poet trying to be difficult or experimental but not succeeding. the political preachiness wears on the reader after a while.

A Commerical Work[.]
Here's a former poet, who has turned the corner -- producings works for mere commerical gain.

A gifted poet on autopilot
Rita Dove continues to milk the cow of her racial specialness by writing about an era (or images of an era) she was too young in which to participate (as well as being too safely ensconced in the middle-class tofeel its genuine horror). Thus her poems have all the touches of WilliamWordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility" but lack theimmediacy of the real perils Rosa Parks and her comrades experienced. Thereis some brilliant writing here; but now the patina of political correctnessis wearing thin. Ms. Dove, as all the Iowa City grads, has mastered thatsomber, priestly, and overly-dramatic voice common to poets who've take onthe mantle of greatness and who presume to be the moral authorities in ourlives by telling us "the truth" and all things that "trulymatter". This book reads as if it's destined to be another book of theBible, meant to last forever and meant to be the correct gloss on theAfrican-American experience. Instead, its pendantic solemnity returns itsfocus over and over again to Ms. Dove's self-absorption and to the sad factthat she is, in the final analysis, a person removed from history (by classrather than race) and the mainstream of American life, black or white. ... Read more

Product Description
Understanding Rita Dove serves as a critical introduction to the poetry of this Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, who was also the first African American poet laureate of the United States. Through close readings of seven poetry collections, Pat Righelato offers detailed analyses of Rita Dove’s thematic concerns and artistic development while bringing to light the musical sense of form and expression of history that permeates Dove’s work. While underscoring each collection’s distinctive identity, Righelato explores the continuities that link volume to volume, from the earliest chapbooks to Dove’s most recent collection, American Smooth.Charting Dove’s evolution as a poet, Righelato begins with The Yellow House on the Corner to identify motifs of the mythical, historical, familial, and autobiographical that have become the writer’s artistic capital. Dove brings African American experience to the mainstream of American poetry in Thomas and Beulah and On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Righelato positions Dove as a successor to Robert Lowell in a preoccupation with family history exemplary of American culture. Righelato also argues for viewing Dove as markedly international. In particular Righelato illuminates Dove’s affinity with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a feminist reading of Mother Love, a volume written in respectful engagement with his Sonnets to Orpheus. ... Read more

Product Description
Rita Dove (b. 1952) was elected Poet Laureate--the first ever African-American to hold the position--in 1993, in recognition of work that combines racially sensitive observation with searing and immediate personal experience. She is best known for her substantial body of poetry, although she has also been recognized for her many accomplishments in drama and fiction, written in both German and English. Crossing Color, written by a well-known Americanist in the European community, is the first full-length critical study offering a comprehensive biographic and literary portrait of Rita Dove and her work. ... Read more

Product Description
A debut novel by the 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. When a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown as an artist-in-residence to teach puppetry to schoolchildren, her homecoming also means dealing with memories of racism, rejected love--and truths about her family. Author readings. ... Read more

Product Description
stories by Pulitzer Prize poet ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A POET'S SHORT STORIES
Most readers are more familiar with Rita Dove, the poet. Suprise! Rita Dove has also done short stories and eight of them are collected in this wonderful volume called Fifth Sunday. It is the first collection of short stories by this reknowned poet.

Fifth Sunday opens the door in the life of African-Americans dealing with life in varied settings. Come to church with Valerie as she daydreams about love and ends up in embarassing circumstances. Check out a gang "leader" from the 60's as he gets married and unexpected guests arrive. Share the Spray Paint King's boredom with the psychologist trying to find out why he does this art.

Dove's characters are complex, down to earth and won't hesitate to speak their minds. From the mid-west to Germany journey with these multi-dimensional characters who will surprise you.

I found this book to be a refreshing look at a poet working in another genre. Rita Dove does a superb job and by all means treat yourself to this marvelous work. ... Read more

Product Description
Pulitzer Prize-winner and former poet laureate of the United States Rita Dove has written prolifically since the early 1970s. In this, the first full-length critical study of her entire body of work by an American scholar, Malin Pereira traces the development of Dove's literary voice, looking at the ways she combines racial specificity with the perspective of the unraced universal.

Pereira examines Dove's poetry, fiction, drama, and literary criticism closely and chronologically, charting her path through the racially charged culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. She demonstrates how Dove eventually transcended racial protocols that threaten to define her work and moves into a nomadic poetic articulation of her cosmopolitan identity.

As Pereira addresses Rita Dove's cosmopolitanism, she also examines the thematic concerns that reoccur in Dove's work--themes such as incest, miscegenation, nomadism, the blues, and patriarchal oppression. ... Read more

Product Description
This text examines contemporary African-American poets from Robert Hayden to Rita Dove. Included is an introduction from Harold Bloom and numerous essays from some of the most respected critics of our time. Learn more about these important poets with this volume of Bloom's Modern Critical Views.

This title, African-American Poets: Volume II, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of African-American Poets: Volume II through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on African-American Poets: Volume II, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Product Description

In 1993, Rita Dove (b. 1952) became the nation's youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate. This collection of interviews offers a fascinating portrait of her.

Having published over a half-dozen collections of poetry, Dove won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah. In addition, she has published a novel, Through the Ivory Gate, and her play, The Darker Face of Earth, has been produced on several stages.

Unlike many other writers, Rita Dove has no objection to being interviewed, in part because she enjoys reading interviews. Toni Morrison's, for instance, gave Dove her inspiration as a beginning writer.

In these conversations that range over a decade and a half, she reveals an extraordinary dedication to preserving the integrity of her art, particularly as others intrude upon her to crusade on behalf of racial and gender issues.

Although she regards herself as a feminist and expresses pride in her African American heritage, she leaves crusading outside the door as she enters the writer's workroom. Once inside, she focuses on making each poem stand up to her own exceptionally rigorous standards.

In these conversations the reader meets also the Rita Dove who lives outside the poet's workroom. In addition to writing, she plays the viola de gamba, is addicted to crossword puzzles, and has taken lessons in singing and in ballroom dancing. In response to "What kind of questions are you not asked in interviews that you would like to answer?" she bravely and surprisingly replies, "Personal questions."

Earl G. Ingersoll is distinguished teaching professor of English emeritus at SUNY College at Brockport. His previous books include Conversations with May Sarton (University Press of Mississippi), The Post-Confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties (with Judith Kitchen and Stan Sanvel Rubin), and Doris Lessing: Conversations, among others. ... Read more

Product Description
This brilliant collection includes selections from Museum, The Yellow House on the Corner, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah. ... Read more

Product Description
With this her fourth book of poems, Rita Dove expands her role as a leading voice in contemporary American letters.The title of the collection serves as an umbrella for the intimate concerns expressed in the forty-eight poems; in music, grace notes are those added to the basic melody, the embellishments that—if played or sung at the right moment with just the right touch—can break your heart.

Isn't this what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks as she explored autobiographical events, most from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then turns to the shadowy areas of regret and memory. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Aged Grace
What Ms. Dove does here seems dated.Some of her poetry cannot help but resound with the complaint of an aged woman watching young men and remembering death, though the sound of her poems does say something else. They reveal her sheer talent, uncovering a music often missing from a gooddeal of contemporary poetry.Ms. Dove's true power, however, lies in hershorter poems which are tight concentrations of tied back emotion.Theyallow the reader to experience the fearful language with his or her ownawareness that the subdued grace of sadness lies just a stroke away foreach of us in our own lives. ... Read more

Product Description

A mid an "explosion in the interest of poetry nationwide" (The New York Times), The Best American Poetry 2000 delivers one of the finest volumes yet in this renowned series. Guest editor Rita Dove, a distinguished figure in the poetry world and the second African-American poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, brings all of her dynamism and well-honed acumen to bear on this project. Dove used a simple yet exacting method to make her selections: "The final criterion," she writes in her introduction, "was Emily Dickinson's famed description -- if I felt that the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in." The result is a marvelous collection of consistently high-quality poems diverse in form, tone, style, stance, and subject matter. With comments from the poets themselves illuminating their poems and a foreword by series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2000 is this year's must-have book for all poetry lovers.Amazon.com Review
In her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2000, Rita Dove offers the key to honest appreciation: read the work for itself, not for its creator's name and rank on the great chain of poetic being. With luck it will take the top of your head off, though some poems may only elicit a tingle the first time around. Put those away and come back another time, in another mood. "A poem must sing," she writes, "even if the song elicits horror." And the 75 she ultimately chose--by such poetic senior citizens as Lucille Clifton, Thom Gunn, W.S. Merwin, and the as yet unacknowledged--both sing and explode. Her harvest is as varied and abundant as the garden (and gardener!) Stanley Plumley celebrates in "Kunitz Tending Roses":

Still, there he is, on any given day,
talking to ramblers, floribundas, Victorian
perpetuals, as if for beauty and to make us
glad or otherwise for envy and to make us
wish for more--if only to mystify and move us.

Some poems are definitely augmented by their creators' explanations--and their prose is often as eloquent as their verse. Others require none. Yet what threatens to steal the poetic show occurs after these comments. The series wizard, David Lehman, asked past and present guest editors to cite their top 15 20th-century American poems, in alphabetical order. It's impossible not to gravitate to this section and silently argue with some selections, approve others wholeheartedly, discover a few for the first time, and remonstrate over certain absences. How marvelous, if unsurprising, to see so many poets voting for Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop (who scores particularly high), and two whom John Hollander wittily terms "the transatlantic problematics," Auden and Eliot. If only Lehman had asked each editor to expound on his or her choices. In this list context, Louise Glück's refusal to "prefer merely fifteen" proves as inspiring as others' elections. Still, it's amusing to watch such poets as Mark Strand, A.R. Ammons, and Lehman himself look for loopholes and stuff the ballot box with also-rans. --Kerry Fried ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

A volume of prose, not poetry
This has to be the most underwhelming selection of The Best American Poetry (TBAP) to date. Word after word, it reads as a thoughtless selection of prose poems; even the free verse seems to have been only randomly broken into various line breaks.Not one challenge to form, structure, white-spaces between words, nor much thought in the linebreaks, and even the big name writers are represented by weak pieces. I read the book cover to cover, hoping to find something worth relishing, yet nothing in the poems inspired enjoyment. I really don't think the guest editor Rita Dove has much sophistication when it comes to poetry. As with her other accolades, Dove seems again to be an Affirmative Action recipient editor.This volume sucks!

An Exceptional Read
David Lehman is one of the most facinating writers, poets, and editors that I have ever read. He is the author of The Daily Mirror, a wonderful and well penned selection of poems.

I believe his perspective and talent for finding the best poets lies in his experience. Mr.Lehman is a great editor and any reader who chooses to pick up and read this book will be thankful.

One can learn so much from the writers and makers of The Best American Poetry books. I also recommend, his most recent book, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. I give all these books 5 stars!

American Poems That The Editor Really Liked
Above is my proposed title for this series; as you can see, I am not a marketing genius.The series is called "Best of" because it needs to sell, and I am all for that if it gets a few more copies off the shelves.I would propose one more change other than the title, although related: replace the Contributors' Comments (though not the Notes) with comments by the editor.The "Best" anthologies are fun not just for the poems included, but also as a reflection the editors' taste.A paragraph or two explaining the merits of each poem and the reason for inclusion would not only create a small portrait of the editor, but would provide another way to consider the anthology as a whole.The Introduction is too short, and the poets' often banal comments about their own work add nothing to a form that should stand self-contained and alone.

Didn't like this one
This was suppose to be a collection of the best poetry in 2000, but i don't feel the same way, I couldn't get into the poetry that was picked for this collection of poetry. I give it two stars because of the poems by Frank X. Gaspar, Forrest Hamer, and Cathy Song.

Author knows a winner
As the author of Blue Street, a new book of romantic poetry, I know how important it is to read other writers' work and absorb other styles.The Best American Poetry is a great collection of works and reading it helped define my style.I recommend it to anyone. ... Read more