Book

Dove, Rita, author.

Grace notes : poems / by Rita Dove.

First edition.

New York ; London : W.W. Norton & Company, [1989]

©1989

xiii, 73 pages ; 22 cm

With this her fourth book of poems - her first since winning the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry - Rita Dove expands her role as a leading voice in contemporary American letters. The title of the collection serves as an umbrella for the intimate concerns expressed in the forty-eight poems ; in music, grace notes are those added to the basic melody, the embellishments that - if played or sung at the right moment with just the right touch - can break your heart. Isn't this what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks as she explores autobiographical events, most from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then turns to the shadowy areas of regret and memory. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life. --from inside jacket cover.

English poetry.

Poetry.

Summit Beach, 1921 -- Silos -- Fifth grade autobiography -- The buckeye -- Quaker Oats -- Flash cards -- Crab-boil -- Hully gully -- Fantasy and science fiction -- Sisters -- Uncle Millet -- Poem in which I refuse contemplation -- Mississippi -- After storm -- Watching Last Year at Marienbad at Roger Haggerty's House in Auburn, Alabama -- Dog days, Jerusalem -- Ozone -- Turning thirty, I contemplate students bicycling home -- Particulars -- Your death -- The wake -- The other side of the house -- Pastoral -- Horse and tree -- The breathing, the endless news -- After reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the third time before bed -- Genetic expedition -- Backyard, 6 a.m. -- Dedication -- Ars Poetica -- Arrow -- Stitches -- In the museum -- And counting -- Dialectical romance -- Medusa -- In a neutral city -- Saints -- Genie's prayer under the kitchen sink -- The gorge -- Canary -- The island women of Paris -- À l'Opéra -- Obbligato -- Lint -- The royal workshops -- On the road to Damascus -- Old folk's home, Jerusalem.

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