Playlist for the Apocalypse Poems

This is Dove's first new collection in a dozen years, following her Collected Poems, 1974--2004 (2016), and it is a potent and many-chambered volume showcasing the highly awarded former U.S. Poet Laureate's signature gift for historical illumination, especially in sharp and poignant portraits of marginalized figures. Here her subjects include Henry Martin, born into slavery at Monticello the day Thomas Jefferson died and who served as the Rotunda bellringer at the University of Virginia, where Dove is a professor, for more than 50 years. Sarra Copia Sullam (1592--1641) was confined to Venice's Jewish ghetto yet became a prominent literary and intellectual luminary. In "The Standing Witness," a song cycle of searing concision inspired by the Statue of Liberty, Dove considers the American story from the assassinations of 1968 through the reign of Muhammad Ali, Roe v. Wade, AIDS, 9/11, the Obama presidency, and the whiplash of Trump. Here, too, are poems of pirouetting wit and jujitsu power about family, food, nature, memory, complacency, protest, and her own valiant battle for health. Dove is a poet of profound perspective, genius, and grace.

In Dove's commanding first collection of new poems since her 2017 NAACP Image Award-winning Collected Poems: 1974-2004, she explores apocalypses in their many forms: climatic, social, personal, and political. From her opening piece commemorating the life of Henry Martin, born into enslavement at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello on the same day Jefferson-"the Great Man"-died, Dove finds powerful moments of grace and resistance in the lives of those who have been oppressed and silenced. These pieces get to the heart of injustice in lines as direct as they are lyrical: "You think/ as long as we stay where/ you've tossed us, on/ the slag heap of your regard,/ the republic is safe." Whether examining the origin of the term ghetto in 16th-century Venice or ruminating on her struggles with illness, Dove's poems hold enormous historical weight and are enriched by her curiosity and keen perceptiveness. For Dove, language presents opportunities for renewed hope; as she writes, "each word caught right is a pawned memory, humbly reclaimed." Dove brilliantly breathes new life into the present age, revealing it as a time for urgent change. (Aug.)