Description

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Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people.  Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents' lives.  Precisely yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove's Selected Poems is marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling.

About the Author

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Riat Dove, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, was born and raised in Akron, Ohio.  She has published the novel Through the Ivory Gate, a collection of stories, a verse drama, a book of essays and five books of poetry, among them Thomas and Beulah, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.  The recipient of numerous literary fellowships and awards, she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia and lives near Charlottesville with her husband, Fred Viebahn, and their daughter, Aviva.

Praise For…

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"Remarkable . . . a poet of dramatic force." --The New York Review of Books

"Consistently accomplished . . . Dove's is a brilliant mind that seeks for itself the widest possible play, an ever-expanding range of reference, the most acute distinctions, and the most subtle shadings of meaning. . . . Her is a major career." --Arnold Rampersad, Callaloo

"Dove's poems, rich with elegant phrasing and Southern spice, blast tradition by pulling readers into other lives and then dazzle them with an often startling mastery of language." --Boston Globe

"Rita Dove . . . is a devoted and subtle storyteller [whose] gifts are evoking, and sometimes exalting, the everyday moments we live by but may neglect or forget, the music of her words issuing a message of uncanny integrity and calm.  Though often writing of private experience (mothering, mourning death, watching rain), she never seems to lose sight of the world beyond." --Newsweek