On the Bus with Rosa Parks

March 29, 1999
Dove's brilliance--as with all great writers--is inextricable from her formal gifts: her poems effortlessly suggest grand narratives and American myths, yet ground themselves tersely in localities, characters, practicalities and particulars. This seventh collection leads off with a Dove specialty, the historical sequence: her "Cameos" lend broad, social relevance to an intermittently abandoned Depression-era wife and her family. As in Alice Munro's fiction, slight notations of near-undetectable actions are keys to deep emotional transformation: "Now she just/ enjoys, and excess/ hardens on her like/ a shell./ She sheens." In subsequent poems such as "Testimonial" and "Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967," Dove revisits precocious origins ("I was pirouette and flourish,/ I was filigree and flame") and traces, with her characteristically strong enjambments, an emerging sexuality: "how her body felt/ tender and fierce, all at once." And as with the Pulitzer Prize-winning sonnets of Thomas and Beulah (no sonnets this time out), the reader follows the poet's imagined rituals and movements--"each night the bed creaking/ cast onto the waves/ each dawn rose flaunting/ their loose tongues of flame"--only to come squarely back to earth in the title section: "Not even my own grandmother would pity me;/ instead she'd suck her teeth at the sorry sight/ of some Negro actually looking for misery.// Well. I'd go home if I knew where to get off." Readers will find that this is the place.

April 15, 2000
Yes, former poet laureate Dove puts us on the bus with Rosa Parks--and brings us together with countless other African American women who endure life's bruises, large and small, with immense dignity. Whatever her subject--and the range is immense, from breast-feeding to travel to her horror of self-pity--Dove is epic in emotion, lyric in her precise, jewel-like lines.

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