NYT Reviews New Rita Dove Collected

Dwight Garner reviews Rita Dove's soaring Collected Poems: 1974–2004 at the New York Times. "She’s funny; she’s after experience; her opinions are fresh," Garner writes. More:

To read the poems of Rita Dove, to go where they take you, is to follow her deeply into a series of themes and their subsets: African-Americans in history and right now, ideas of indenture and independence, sex, travel, language (she compares commas to “miniature scythes”), family, motherhood, roomy adult love and whatever is coming out of the radio.

The verse in Ms. Dove’s career-spanning new “Collected Poems: 1974-2004” demonstrates that this poet’s work leans, too, on the consolations of food: fried fish and hominy, martinis and beer, caviar and sour herring. “Bee vomit,” a boy tells his sister in one poem, “that’s all honey is.” In another, there’s this snapshot of the breakfast table: “You are mine, I say to the twice-dunked cruller/before I eat it.”

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There are so many casual pleasures in Ms. Dove’s poetry that the precision and dexterity in her work — the darkness, too — can catch you unawares. Take for example “Parsley,” the final poem in her collection “Museum” (1983).

Parsley. It’s a garnish. It’s also the word that Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, used in 1937 to send thousands of immigrant Haitian cane-cutters to their deaths. He identified the Creole-speaking Haitians by having his soldiers demand they pronounce the Spanish word perejil (parsley). They were killed if they could not properly roll their R’s.

Ms. Dove’s poem about this massacre is among her most ambitious and assured. She moves between perspectives. At one moment we are in the cane fields, the next Trujillo’s palace. She pivots formally, too, between hints of the sestina and the villanelle.

Continue reading at New York Times.