“Collected into this first book, Rita Dove’s poems announce a young poet of wide interests, deep sensibility, and justifiable confidence in her considerable powers. Coupling close attention to significant detail with a broad sense of history, the poet is able to give both concrete immediacy and philosophical resonance to her lines. Whether recounting poignant stages of adolescence or re-creating painful episodes of slave history, she speaks with a directness and a dramatic intensity that command attention. . . . [Rita Dove] fashions imaginative constructs that strike the reader as much by their ‘rightness’ as their originality. An extraordinary debut.” (Joseph Parisi, The Booklist)
|
