Dove, Rita

Dove's Style and Mother Themes

In her poetry, Dove is known for a tight, lyrical style that embraces a diversity of form, from free verse to more traditional forms such as the sonnet. Trained in playing the viola and cello, Dove frequently uses music as both subject and metaphor, as in the collection American Smooth (2004), which features such poems as “Fox Trot Fridays,” “Samba Summer,” and “Blues in Half-Tones,% Time.”

As comfortable with classical allusions as she is with music, Dove references many of the more well-known figures of biblical and ancient literature, such as Herodias's daughter in “The Seven Veils of Salomé,” portraying the story from multiple perspectives, including Salomé, whose dancing seduces King Herod and persuades him to grant her John the Baptist's head.

The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone takes center stage in Dove's collection Mother Love, which features the voices of a late-20th-century daughter abroad in Paris, her artist lover, and her worried mother. The poems in Mother Love, many of which are sonnets, evoke the kidnapping of Persephone by Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, and the onset of fall and winter that results from the goddess of agriculture's grief for her abducted daughter.

In the collection Grace Notes, her poem “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed” also explores the relationship of a mother and daughter, though in this instance the poet-speaker depicts a moment when her 3-year-old daughter discovers “her vagina:/hairless, this mistaken/bit of nomenclature/is what a stranger cannot touch/without her yelling.” In other poems, such as “Genetic Expedition,” Dove explores the experience of interracial marriage and her daughter's biracial identity: “… My child has/her father's hips, his hair/like the miller's daughter, combed gold./Though her lips are mine, housewives/stare when we cross the parking lot/because of that ghostly profusion.”

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