![]() ![]() Not hers.Rita Dove revels in contradictions. ![]() You sense the books of many poets of Dove’s generation slipping to the back of the bookcase. Yet a poem titled “No Color” has this crushing ending: “I never thought / I’d find relief / in the old joke that it’s always darkest / before it goes pitch black, / but at least then / it will be dark and then / thank god, black.” Dove understands that retreat can lead to rout. In “Blues, Straight,” Dove writes, “I just find myself on pause- / paused for longer than is / proper.” The poem ends: “Strange, I know, to wish / for nothing. (Alas, she adds, there is “the swift metallic smack / of too much thyme administered hastily, / the kind of mistake you never make again”). In a poem titled “Soup,” when a doctor tells her the bad news, all the speaker can think of is making a pot. She feels lucky to have a “semblance of my old healthy life back,” even if she can no longer reliably write her poems by hand. Dove, who is now 68, eventually got a diagnosis of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, and medications keep symptoms somewhat at bay.ĭove has written often about her predilection for dancing, and ballroom dancing, she says here, helped her relearn to walk steadily. There were years of anxiety and depression. The book’s endnotes give the entire story.Īfter the lower half of her body suddenly went numb in the shower in 1997, there were early predictions of progressive immobility. The final section of “Playlist for the Apocalypse” is titled “Little Book of Woe,” and it addresses the author’s health troubles. To roll out a drawl … just as it’s understood “potluck” means While their children, inflections flattened Here are the first 21 lines of “Family Reunion,” a resonant poem about, among other things, class, family, the Great Migration, code switching and the consolations of the table: A few of these more specifically historical poems, such as the ones about Watergate and Roe v. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali (“Black man’s got no business being / both pretty and bold”) and Barack Obama (“Ladies and Gents, the unimaginable / is open for business!”). There are poems about the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. ![]() Others have titles including “Girls on the Town, 1946” (“the dimples are / extra currency, though you take care to keep / powder from caking those charmed valleys”) and “Elevator Man, 1949,” about a clever Black man shunted into a dismal job (“he was a bubble of bad air / in a closed system”) because of his race. One poem is told from the perspective of Henry Martin, who was said to be Thomas Jefferson’s mixed-race grandson. It’s about watching “one righteous integer of cool cruising down a great-lipped / channel of hushed adoration, women turned girls / again, brightening in spite of themselves.” He checks out women as he glides along, stealing what Jim Harrison used to call a “fanny glance.” In another poem, “From the Sidelines,” women return the gaze. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously - famously in my house, anyway - wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”Īs the poem continues, the speaker senses he is riding “a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave / of the goddamn century, the East River / twerking her bedazzled behind.” One of the best, “Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. It’s surprising then to find so many aubades - morning poems - in “Playlist for the Apocalypse.” Her sleepless eye for cant, necessary in all good poetry, is a bonus.ĭove has written about how she feels most alive at night, liking to write from midnight to 5 a.m. Dove’s books derive their force from how she so deftly stirs the everyday - insomnia, TV movies, Stilton cheese, rattling containers of pills - into her world of ideas and intellection, in poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious. It’s about family, food and front porches, too. This book is the first time the poet has publicly acknowledged that she has - and has had for more than 20 years - a form of multiple sclerosis. It’s about the weight of American history, which Dove treats as news we’re still actively metabolizing. It’s about life in what she calls this “shining, blistered republic.” The title makes it leap from the bookcase. “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” Rita Dove’s new book of poems, is among her best. Would we feel the same way about Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust” if it were called, as he once considered, “Malpractice in the Dust”? It’s incumbent on the author of a good book to provide an apt title. Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former poet laureate of the United States Photo: Damon Winter, STF / The New York Times ![]()
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