The book won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first awarded to a black female since Gwendolyn Brooks' prize in 1950.ĭove followed with The Other Side of the House (1988) and Grace Notes (1989) juxtaposed with short fiction in Fifth Sunday (1985) a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992) the one-act play The Siberian Village (1991) and a verse drama, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994). Dove based the intimate glimpses on the stories of her grandmother Georgianna, who brightened widowhood by reliving romance and marriage in shared memories. The height of this collection is "Parsley," a depiction of Rafael Trujillo's slaughter of 20,000 Caribbean blacks on the basis of their pronunciation of perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.ĭove reached literary maturity with a dramatic coup, Thomas and Beulah (1986), a forty-four-poem tribute to her Southern-born maternal grandparents. While teaching at the University of Arizona, she composed Museum (1983), a hymn to history and culture that moved toward a more mature expression beyond the limitations of personal experience. Blending political undercurrent into personal memoir, she began submitting to national poetry journals and published The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980) and a poetic slave memoir entitled The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). In 1979, Dove married novelist Fred Viebahn, father of their daughter, Aviva Chantal, and translator of German editions of Dove's verse. in creative writing and issued a first volume, Ten Poems (1977). While she was a teaching fellow at the Writer's Workshop of the University of Iowa, she earned an M.F.A.
She completed her education on a Fulbright/Hays Scholarship at the University of Tübingen. After a change of heart in her junior year, she also dismayed teachers by embracing poetry as a career goal. Although she was a Phi Beta Kappa inductee and stellar graduate of Miami University, she disappointed her parents by taking creative writing workshops while pretending to study law. After earning a National Merit Scholarship and ranking among the nation's top 100 high school seniors in 1970, she accepted a Presidential Scholarship and a tour of the White House. Dove intended to make the most of her talents. She discovered her gift for word manipulation in early childhood.
Her finished verse spirials out of everyday images and shards of sound, thought, and long-nurtured memory.ĭove was born in Akron, Ohio, on August 28, 1952. Her low-key, high intensity poems are distillations brewed by night until predawn from private imaginings and wordplay at her one-room cabin outside Charlottesville, Virginia. She has earned praise for concrete immediacy. A complex intellectual, Dove has edited Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, and TriQuarterly and served at Harvard on the Afro-American Studies Visiting Committee while producing some of the twentieth century's most controlled, viscerally satisfying imagery. W.The first black and youngest author to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, Rita Frances Dove considers herself the heir of Phillis Wheatley, slave poet of the colonial era. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” ( Poetry magazine). The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite 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.
She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. Three decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume. Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award
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