Parsley
“Parsley” is a poem inspired by the 1937 real life atrocity in which brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo commissioned the murder of 20,000 black workers simply because they could not pronounce the Spanish word for parsley correctly. The first second provides the background of horrific conditions under which the poor people were expected to work while the second section attempts to penetrate into the kind of mindset that would spur Trujillo to do such a thing.
In the Old Neighborhood
In which a trip back to the home in which she lived as a child is viewed through the adult lens of the poet’s return as something less solid and slightly more alienating and bizarre than what she remembers as a child.
Nexus
“Nexus” is a more accessible example of the often abstract nature of many of Dove’s excursions intot he poetic. A praying mantis sitting in the windowsill has proven to be a distraction to her ability to write and when she decides to get out of the house, the little insect has transformed into a dinosaur.
Geometry
When abstraction loses its accessibility to a larger audience, the result often looks like “Geometry.” The poem is a mere geometrically perfect three stanzas by three lines, yet from its opening assertion the ultimate meaning proves only to become murkier: “I prove a theorem and the house expands.” Imagery of the ceiling floating away and the windows unhinging into butterflies serve to create a beautiful experience worth returning to again and again.
Thomas and Beulah
Thomas and Beulah is not just a single poem, but a collection of 44 poems interconnected poems inspired by her grandparents that brought Dove the Pulitzer Prize. Although each poem in the collection can stand separately, taken together the result is more like an astonishing verse novel in which the reader gets to know the two title characters in a way that even a single epic poem could not. By unifying the individual poems through character, history and theme, each poem can penetrate deeper into the individual moments or events they take as their subject. In addition, subsequent poems begin to reflect back upon previous poems create connections that are layered with meaning by allowing the reader to fill in the gaps of missing information.
Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Cocoanut Grove
This exercise in history through free verse examines the night that the Academy Awards ceremony at the Cocoanut Grove made history. Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Oscar for acting for her role in Gone with the Wind and the focus situate the racial tensions in America relative to McDaniel being surrounded by room almost entirely populated by whites except for her
Grape Sherbet
A somewhat abstract recollection of a childhood holiday tradition. The speaker recalls how her father made a ritual of taking the kids to the cemetery on Memorial Day to play and eat sherbet.
On the Bus with Rosa Parks
Like Thomas and Beulah, this work is a collection of poetry predicated upon a literary conceit. Though not as intricately connected as the previous collection, the central thrust of all the poems is arriving at the moment that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, thus stimulating the bus boycott and kicking the Civil Rights movement into the mainstream eye. What Dove seeks to reveal is that the moment in which Parks had simply had enough and finally decided to say no was not a rebellious act occurring in vacuum. The poems in this collection provide historical background, political context and an awareness of the eruption of a social movement which had been bubbling unnoticed by that mainstream eye for longer than most ever imagined.
