Collected Poems

Starred review from May 16, 2016
This substantive and enriching decades-spanning volume charts the work of Dove (Sonata Mulattica)—a Pulitzer Prize recipient, former U.S. poet laureate, and Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal recipient—as she forged her legacy from a sharp, unflinching eye that skillfully turned history into collective memory. Dove’s virtuosity keeps her poems from feeling trite or recycled. Poems such as “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove” take a historical event and treat it with tenderness, using the second person to heighten the intimacy between reader and subject: “dear Mammy we can’t help but hug you crawl into/ your generous lap.” Whether experimental or lyrical, Dove’s poems work as hypnotizing incantations. She slips into the fantastical dramatics of myth in poems from 1995’s Mother Love, which uses the Greek tale of Persephone and Hades as foundation for a modernized tragedy of toxic lust and the limits of a mother’s love. Instead of a Greek maiden falling prey to a scheming god of the underworld, Dove’s Persephone is a naive black girl seduced by the promise of Paris and a Frenchman who “was good/ with words, words that went straight to the liver.” Through her alluring language, Dove has long made the exceedingly difficult seem effortless; each poem here is a testament to her brilliance.

May 15, 2016

This Collected gathers the published verse to date (with the exception of 2009's Sonata Mulattica and fugitive pieces) of one of American poetry's most important public figures, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and former U.S. poet laureate Dove. Dove, who has used her high profile to advocate for the reading of poetry and to explore the complex experience of African Americans in her verse, began as a precise lyricist, with a form reminiscent of peers such as Jane Kenyon or Jane Hirshfield. Since 1986's Thomas and Beulah, detailing one African American family's life over several decades, Dove has displayed an increasing interest in history, narrative, and larger, looser poetic structures. These later pieces are mixed successes; Mother Love, despite Dove's description, is not a sonnet sequence, and some recent poems, e.g., "The Passage," are notably prosy, although many lines still generate a striking image or musical phrase. While some readers may miss the insight and concision of her early work, her investigations have integrity and intelligence, offering readers of all backgrounds needed and valuable perspectives. VERDICT Most libraries will want to acquire this generous collection; many will want Dove's much-praised Sonata Mulattica as well. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

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