The height of this collection is "Parsley," a depiction of Rafael Trujillo's slaughter of 20,000 Caribbean blacks on the basis of their pronunciation of perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.ĭove reached literary maturity with a dramatic coup, Thomas and Beulah (1986), a forty-four-poem tribute to her Southern-born maternal grandparents. While teaching at the University of Arizona, she composed Museum (1983), a hymn to history and culture that moved toward a more mature expression beyond the limitations of personal experience. Blending political undercurrent into personal memoir, she began submitting to national poetry journals and published The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980) and a poetic slave memoir entitled The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). In 1979, Dove married novelist Fred Viebahn, father of their daughter, Aviva Chantal, and translator of German editions of Dove's verse.
in creative writing and issued a first volume, Ten Poems (1977). While she was a teaching fellow at the Writer's Workshop of the University of Iowa, she earned an M.F.A. She completed her education on a Fulbright/Hays Scholarship at the University of Tübingen. After a change of heart in her junior year, she also dismayed teachers by embracing poetry as a career goal. Although she was a Phi Beta Kappa inductee and stellar graduate of Miami University, she disappointed her parents by taking creative writing workshops while pretending to study law. After earning a National Merit Scholarship and ranking among the nation's top 100 high school seniors in 1970, she accepted a Presidential Scholarship and a tour of the White House. Dove intended to make the most of her talents. She discovered her gift for word manipulation in early childhood. Her finished verse spirials out of everyday images and shards of sound, thought, and long-nurtured memory.ĭove was born in Akron, Ohio, on August 28, 1952. Her low-key, high intensity poems are distillations brewed by night until predawn from private imaginings and wordplay at her one-room cabin outside Charlottesville, Virginia. She has earned praise for concrete immediacy. A complex intellectual, Dove has edited Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, and TriQuarterly and served at Harvard on the Afro-American Studies Visiting Committee while producing some of the twentieth century's most controlled, viscerally satisfying imagery. The first black and youngest author to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, Rita Frances Dove considers herself the heir of Phillis Wheatley, slave poet of the colonial era.
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