Rita Dove

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. "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

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding the world’s experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives—the simmering resentment of a lift operator, an octogenarian’s exuberant mambo, the mordant humour of a philosophising cricket. Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.

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.

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.

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding the world’s experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives—the simmering resentment of a lift operator, an octogenarian’s exuberant mambo, the mordant humour of a philosophising cricket. Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.

Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than a hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, and Justin Philip Reed, combined with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Evie Shockley, and Meta DuEwa Jones.The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice, to ask, "What's next for Black poetic expression?

Rita Dove’s Collected Poems: 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of US poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s 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, industrialisation and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the 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.

Rita Dove’s Collected Poems: 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of US poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s 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, industrialisation and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the 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.

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.

In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos", to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.

Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth is Rita Dove’s first play. Set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, it has been performed to great critical acclaim.

Gathers poems that recast the ancient Greek story of Demeter and Persephone in a variety of settings, from a patio in Arizona to the pyramids in Mexico, as they explore the complex mother-daughter bond

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.

A reissuing of Museum, poems by Rita Dove.

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.