On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems

The Pulitzer Prize-winning former Poet Laureate of the United States offers a poetic celebration of the complexities of human life in a collection that includes such works as "Cameos," "The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians," "The Enactment," and "Black on a Saturday Nightz."

Dove's brillianceAas with all great writersAis 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 movementsA"each night the bed creaking/ cast onto the waves/ each dawn rose flaunting/ their loose tongues of flame"Aonly 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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Univ. of Virginia professor, Pulitzer winner, and former Poet Laureate, Dove has reaped great rewards for verse, such as this seventh collection, which is really quite modest in design and accomplishment. Always genial and accessible, Doves economical, never-erring poems have the same homey charms and family wisdom of Zora Neale Hurstons fiction: Cameos is a verse collage that bears witness to a time and place: the 20s and 30s in Ohio, where a boy grows up among a lot of doting sisters, never bonds with his clowning father, and prefers science to music. Theres more than a touch of inspiration and uplift (but no Maya Angelou smarminess) in Doves affirmative poems: two celebrate her young self as a reader of the stuff we humans are made of. Dawn Revisited marvels at the promise of a new day and a second chance. The poet is uncomfortable with repose (Against Repose) and refuses to give in to self-pity in front of her daughter (Against Self-Pity). Shes proud of her dignified mother, working as a seamstress to finance business school; and admires the old lady in G"tterdammerung, who, despite aches and pains, will not give up on adventure, travel, and her own sexuality. A public poet as well, Dove pays homage to the Capitol building (Lady Freedom Among Us) and, in the title sequence, with indirection and context, narrates the saga of Rosa Parks and a few less-famous bus-riding women in the Jim Crow South for whom, as Dove so eloquently puts it, Doing nothing was the doing. Dove extols the life force in chants clear and democratic. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.