A “good day” topples with the dread of a simple phrase: “I know what’s coming.” ![]() In poems which consider the intersections of family, race, history, and memory, Dove’s sparkling, jewel-like images range from playful (a passenger waiting for a flight’s boarding call is “perched like a seal trained for the plunge”) to luscious (in “Girls on the Town, 1946” the subject and her friends “have lacquered up and pinned on your tailfeathers, / fit to sally forth and trample each plopped heart / quivering at the tips of your patent leather / Mary Janes”) to knowing (a man is “one righteous integer of cool cruising down a great-lipped / channel of adoration”).īut even in comparatively less adorned poems, like “Eurydice, Turning,” Dove knows just how to hold our attention, in this case with reversals and digressions that mimic the whiplash of the poet-speaker’s experience of her mother’s memory loss. Like the best playlists, this assured collection both satisfies and surprises.Ī found sonnet drawn from wig advertisements, a two-column mirror poem, and a Golden Shovel: these and other forms lend a mosaic-like quality to “Time’s Arrow,” the book’s first section. Expansive in theme, tone, and subject matter across its six sections, Playlist for the Apocalypse defies generalization and offers ample opportunity to appreciate Dove’s extraordinary, honed talents, especially her gift for bridging past and present through persona, her musical phrasing, and her deft handling of form. ![]() Norton & Company, appeared in 2016), and well worth the twelve-year wait. Playlist for the Apocalypse is Rita Dove’s first book of new poems since 2009’s virtuoso Sonata Mulattica (her Collected Poems: 1974–2004, also from W.
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