Alongside members of her own family, Dove’s wide-flung engagements include Persephone, Rosa Parks, eighteenth-century African-American scientist Benjamin Banneker, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and many others. For example, her third book, Thomas and Beulah (1986)-which won the Pulitzer Prize-imaginatively renders the story of her maternal grandparents, making sensory and immediate the Great Migration and the industrial landscape of 1920s Ohio. Her oeuvre unites lyric and narrative traditions. 1952) has created a poetic landscape that claims the intimacy of history, dismantling facile binaries of good and bad, inside and outside. At once grounded in the body and extending across space and time, the exacting and ambitious “Ö”-and the collection that contains it-heralded a new voice in American literature.Īcross eight collections, Dove (b. The poem starts with the architecture of the body-the mouth piecing together familiar shapes to make way in foreign terrain-and opens onto a meditation about the potential of precise language to reroute unfolding history. That’s island”: So begins the last poem in Rita Dove’s debut collection, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). Whatever form she is working in, her poetry lives up to her own high ideals: “I believe that language sings.“Shape the lips to an o, say a. This is partly due to Dove’s musical instinct (she played the cello from a young age) which underpins her immaculate sense of phrasing.

The critic Helen Vendler has said of Dove’s poems that they “fall on the ears with solace”. Ultimately though, like her dancing body, Dove’s poetry isn’t restricted by notions of race or gender. Celebration becomes the best form of protest, whether it’s the soldiers returning from the Western Front who play their music “right up white-faced 5th Avenue” (‘The Return of Lieutenant James Reese Europe’) or Dove herself dancing so ecstatically in ‘American Smooth’ she and her partner take off for a moment from the earth. Be they famous or humble, Dove’s sensual technique collapses the barriers of history to bring the reader into intimate contact with her subjects. However, Dove is as much interested in what she has termed “the underside of history” exploring the quiet lives of those who, like Thomas and Beulah, are omitted from the official record. She currently holds the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia and was recently elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.ĭove is an inspirational figure for African-Americans and for women, and her own work reflects these two important facets of her life, featuring many iconic names including Billie Holiday, Rosa Parks and Hattie McDaniel. Her many other awards include over twenty honorary doctorates, the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and, in 2006, the Commonwealth Award of Distinguished Service. In 1993 Dove became the American Poet Laureate, making her both the youngest recipient of this honour and the first African American. Seven years later her third book, Thomas and Beulah, based on her grandparents’ lives, won the Pulitzer Prize. Her glittering academic career was soon matched by her growing reputation as a poet, her first collection, The Yellow House on the Corner, appearing in 1980. Dove went on to study English at Miami University, Ohio, was a Fulbright Scholar at Tubingen in Germany, before joining the renowned University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 1952) was encouraged by her parents to read widely from a young age and she explored all that the local library in Akron, Ohio, had to offer.

Geometry by rita dove