Grace Notes: Poems

By Rita Dove

Book Overview

The title of the collection serves as an umbrella for the intimate concerns expressed in the forty-eight poems; in music, grace notes are those added to the basic melody, the embellishments that--if played or sung at the right moment with just the right touch--can break your heart.

Isn't this what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks as she explored autobiographical events, most from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then turns to the shadowy areas of regret and memory. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393306968
• ISBN13: 9780393306965
• Release Date: March 1991
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Aged Grace

What Ms. Dove does here seems dated. Some of her poetry cannot help but resound with the complaint of an aged woman watching young men and remembering death, though the sound of her poems does say something else. They reveal her sheer talent, uncovering a music often missing from a good deal of contemporary poetry. Ms. Dove's true power, however, lies in her shorter poems which are tight concentrations of tied back emotion. They allow the reader to experience the fearful language with his or her own awareness that the subdued grace of sadness lies just a stroke away for each of us in our own lives.