I tried. I really did. My lack of enthusiasm is not due to lack of greatness in Rita Dove. I am just not a poetry person. When I heard her read a selection of her work on NPR, it was magical. I just can’t figure out how to capture that magic through reading. Maybe if I took her class when I had the chance all those years ago?

This collection was hit or miss for me. What I liked, I really liked and struck a chord with me. She writes in a narrative with several of the poems continuing a tale begun in another. In this way there was a familiarity in tone and mood. Some of my favorite lines included:"What's invisible sings, and we bear witness. if we would listen!""He is weary of analysis, the small predictable truths.""To him, work is a narrow grief...""Wretched little difference, he thinks, between enduring pain and wai...

This may possibly be the best poetry book I’ve ever read. It’s inspired me to take more observation of the world around me and write poetry whenever it comes to me, something I fell out of habit to do a long time ago.

EXCELLENT!!!!! It took me a while to get through the entire collection but it was well worth the careful reading. Rita Dove is brilliant and if you haven't read any of her poetry you should. I wish I would have been assigned her poetry when I was college. It would have made for great class discussion.

Rita Dove is a great story-telling poet with a wide range of interests that make for an eclectic and entertaining collected works. I didn't connect with some of the earliest collections, but was glad I stuck with the book--beautiful, insightful writing.

At this point, this collection is a dear friend. I've read a poem or two each morning since the height of my quarantine aimlessness in mid June. Dove has been my constant, startling me, making me pause and reread and dog-ear pages, pushing me to furiously Google figures from history or mythology or movies. Meanwhile, my back has given me trouble on and off since this summer, and I can't tell you how many mornings, at like 5AM, I've waited for water to boil while lying as flat as possible on my k...

Many of my favorite collections bundled together in one great book. Dove's poems blend the personal with the historical showing us pivotal moments, injustices endured with courage and intelligence, through the concrete examples from dusting, to cooking, to building zeppelins, to a company picnic to war on the other side of the ocean. Well crafted but what always grabs me by the throat in Dove's poem is the persona, speakers who take us inside the mind whose day to day being is constantly shaping...

Some I loved and related to and some I had absolutely no idea. I loved the way my humunculus took over for dramatic readings.

Published twenty-one years after Rita Dove finished serving as the U.S. poet laureate, her Collected Poems gathers together seven volumes of poetry written over the course of three decades: the compilation sketches the trajectory of the early and middle stages of Dove's brilliant career as a poet, leaving out only her most recent work. The poems of Dove's first two collections—The Yellow House on the Corner and Museum—read as a bit underdeveloped and scattered, but they still anticipate many of

“The sun crouched behind leaves, but the trees had long since walked away. The meaning that surfaces comes to me aslant and I go to meet it, stepping out of my body word for word, until I am everything at once: the perfume of the world in which I go under, a skindiver remembering air.”NOVEMBER FOR BEGINNERS Snow would be the easy way out—that softening sky like a sigh of relief at finally being allowed to yield…We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving…When...

I don't read much poetry. Ms. Dove's style is not like any poetry I've encountered. It's more like story-telling, with chapters, that led me along. My favorite section was about Thomas and Beulah and their lives, seen from each of their points of view.

Actually, four and one-half (4 1/2) stars; not four (4) alone.Years ago, I read the Holy Bible cover to cover and walked away thinking that while it is the voice of God as told through humanity -- and thus, an autobiography of sorts of God Almighty written by a whole bunch of "ghost writers" or writers inhibited with the Holy Ghost -- it made for some pretty good reading. But I also felt it was an interesting autobiography in that it told of the arc of God's own spiritual and emotional maturatio...

This book is a really nice collection of poems which I really enjoyed. All of my favourite Rita Dove poems are in here. She is a brilliant, earthy poet with a lot of messages woven into her beautiful and elegantly crafted poetry. This is a really great collection which I thoroughly enjoyed.

What I want is this poem to be small,a ghost townon the larger map of wills. Then you can pencil me in as a hawk; a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

Weirdly, this review runs the risk of me airing my grievances about collected volumes of poetry: there's something about the material value of slim volumes, the experience of finding one that packs the punch of a full novel. This effect seems dulled to me when poems are formatted as they are here, where one poem begins immediately after another ends, instead of on a new page—a sure way to save paper, along with the slightly oversized pages. But this does do something to the experience of reading...

Since this is a collection, my rating is an amalgamation of all the books therein. Mother Love is my favorite, and were I rating that one on its own, my rating would be 4 stars. I'm ashamed to say I had never heard of Rita Dove before happening upon this volume on my library's ebook site. It's taken me almost 3 weeks to read through the whole thing, and I know that my read has been on the shallow side—this is my first time becoming acquainted with Rita Dove, and I expect to return to her works l...

I'd already read a small portion of this book when I read Dove's Mother Love published in 1995. All of that was included in this one which makes sense since this is a collection. There is some interesting, enlightening, and refreshing imagery in these poems. I like the story telling. I like both the personal history and other history. I like imagining through Rita Dove's eyes. I like how she sees things.This part of a poem I like called "I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land" caught my attent...

This is a great collection of work. I felt like I understood more of these then I have in the last couple of poetry books I've read, but that could be because there are so many more poems in this collection. I especially like the set that were from the point of view of the man and then the woman and the whole bunch that were inspired by the Persephone myth.

4.5 starsImpeccable poetry. I think my favorites were from Grace Notes: Poems, Mother Love, and On the Bus With Rosa Parks - that's roughly the poems Rita Dove had published in collections between 1989 and 1999. It will be interesting to read these collected works again, in the future, and see if that remains true!

I can't quite remember what led me to pick up this collection, but I must have read one of Rita Doves poems somewhere and really liked it. Sadly, this wasn't the case for most of the poems in this collection (mostly because I'm not hugely into narrative poems). There were a handful I really liked, and I liked the overall experience of reading this collection, but most of the poems just were not for me.