Ms. Dove's honors include Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Mellon fellowships, sixteen honorary doctorates, the NAACP Great American Artist Award, Glamour magazine's "Woman of the Year" Award, the New York Public Library's "Literary Lion" citation, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Acievement, as well as residencies at Tuskegee Institute, the National Humanities Center, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Servelloni in Bellagio, Italy. In 1996 she received both the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the Charles Frankel Prize/National Medal in the Humanities, and in 1997 she was honored with the Sara Lee Frontrunner Award and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.
Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, German writer Fred Viebahn, and their daughter Aviva.
Hear Rita Dove Recite her one of her poems
Sonata
Mulattica: Poems
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Paperback: 231 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 27, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393338932
ISBN-13: 978-0393338935
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
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.
American
Smooth: Poems
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ISBN: 0393059871
Format: Hardcover, 143pp
Pub. Date: September 2004
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Occasion to celebrate: a new collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate'her first in five years.
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. Hattie
McDaniel, the first African American to win an Oscar, makes her way through
crowds to receive the award. A girl in Harlem studies the flirtations of the
adult world, so that someday she too can "pop right out."
Fred Astaire once proclaimed, "I just put my feet in the air and move them
around." Like Astaire, Dove, speaking intimately to us as we lean in, is
such a master that we never notice the labor of creation.
Thomas
and Beulah
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ISBN: 0887480217
Format: Paperback, 79pp
Pub. Date: July 1987
Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
The poems in this unusual book tell a story, forming a narrative almost like a realistic novel. Read in sequence as intended, they tell of the lives of a married black couple (not unlike Dove's own grandparents) from the early part of the century until their deaths in the 1960s, a period that spans the great migration of blacks from rural south to urban north. But this is merely the social backdrop to the story of a marriage. Two separate sequences 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 a detailed, poetically dense portrait of two lives in all their frailty, dignity and complexity. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987.
Selected
Poems
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ISBN: 0679750800
Format: Paperback, 240pp
Pub. Date: September 1993
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Here for the first time in one volume is a selection of the astonishing poems of Rita Dove, the nation's new Poet Laureate, the youngest poet so named, as well as the first African-American chosen for the position. 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 Thomas and Beulah (winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize), a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents' lives. Precise yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove's Selected Poems is marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling
 On
the Bus with Rosa Parks: PoemsClick to order via Amazon
ISBN: 039332026X A new collection by a much celebrated poet, former Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove. From the opening sequence, "Cameos," which probes the private griefs and dreams of a working-class family, to the emblematic grace of a living legend like Rosa Parks, who acquiesced to public life in order to "serve the public good," these poems explore the intersection of individual fates with the grand arc of history. If there are heroes, Dove maintains, they continually reinvent themselves, as each of us must do each morning.
Other poems range from the playfulness of "The First Book" (Open it/Go ahead, it won't bite./Well_maybe a little.) to the great power of "Black on a Saturday Night":
The book culminates in "On the Bus with Rosa Parks," a masterful series which brings the reader right into the heart of the civil rights struggle with poems like "Freedom Ride" (but where you sit is where you'll be/when the fire hits.) and "The situation is intolerable". Here are unintentional heroes, who, with simple acts of courage, change the course of history. People like Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith who violated city public transportation segregation laws by refusing to give their seats to white passengers, and of course, Rosa Parks, whose legacy for her historic refusal to move to the back of the bus defines the spirit of the struggle (How she sat there,/the time right inside a place/so wrong it was ready.). In these electrifying, brilliant poems, Dove shows how we are all on that bus with Rosa Parks. Ordinary people with dreams for the future, with a desire for respect, with no need for celebrity but a willingness to do what needs to be done. This is how all of us, heroes or not, must reinvent ourselves each morning. Whether parable or meditation, confession or praise, the poems in ON THE BUS WITH ROSA PARKS confirm Rita Dove's place as one of the most important American voices of our time.
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| From The Publisher: Marking the end of Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove's two-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States, this new collection again confirms her extraordinary power and grace as a poet. Mother Love calls upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to examine the tenacity of love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter; each daughter a potential mother. |
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Table of Contents
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From Publisher's Weekly: This slim volume shows Dove-Pulitzer Prize winner, novelist and 1993-95 U.S. Poet Laureate-at the height of her poetic powers. In the tightly crafted two-page introduction, essential to understanding these sequential poems, she cites Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus as her model. She notes that she has elected the tightly constrained sonnet form to explore the mother/ daughter drama because its narrators-here variously Demeter, Persephone and nameless modern-day mothers and daughters-``are struggling to sing in their chains.'' In some poems the speaker's energy breaks free, but Dove continually returns to the strict 14-linesonnet form. However, whereas Rilke maintains a division between self and other, the human and godly, Dove merges her voices into the voice of a single speaker. The result is vividly contemporary and ironic, occasionally bordering on farce. Hell is depicted as pseudo-cultured Parisian society or an Italian grotto; the narrator, confronting a ``gatekeeper'' who is obviously afraid of the dark presence before him, quips, ``hasn't he seen an American Black/ before? We find a common language: German.'' (May)
Related Links The Rita Dove Links Voices From the Gaps - Rita Dove Page Book Stacks Poetry The Heinz Awards The Circle Associations Rita Dove Page
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