In Dove’s hands, the story is used to investigate the value of myth as a perennial interpretative device.ĭove has always liked to approach any complex subject from a variety of perspectives. This myth has already been used, notably by Tennyson to represent Demeter’s sorrow and by the contemporary poet Jorie Graham to explore the predicament of a woman who is both daughter of her mother and mother of a daughter. Finally, the gods restore Persephone, but, because she has eaten six pomegranate seeds while she was in Hades’ kingdom, she can remain with her mother only six months of the year. When Persephone is abducted by Hades, the king of the Underworld, her mother, Demeter, who is the goddess of agriculture, ceases, in her grieving, to attend to the crops, and everything withers. The book takes as its central myth the story of Demeter and Persephone, the archetypal story of mother love, which was invented to explain the origins of seasonal change. Now in “Mother Love” (dedicated: “F or my mother / T o my daughter”) Dove brings into close focus the pained relation between mothers and daughters. If she did not go so far as Blake in seeing a baby as “a fiend hid in a cloud,” she did say, memorably:Įach house notches into its neighbor and then the next, the whole row scaldingly white, unmistakable as a set of bared teeth. There she observed motherhood in a detached manner.
The theme was evident-and very originally handled-in some poems in “Grace Notes,” a volume published in 1989. “Mother Love” is not the first of Dove’s volumes to address motherhood. She is married to the German novelist Fred Viebahn, and they have a daughter, Aviva. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is now Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. A Fulbright brought her to Tübingen after that, she took an M.F.A. She was born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, and educated at Miami University in Ohio. These draw upon the events of her life but do so with remarkable objectivity. (Her previous works include the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Thomas and Beulah.”) In these books, Dove, who is black, has in part carried on a lyric tradition that explicitly treats themes of blackness, but she has also written many poems outside that tradition-poems of childhood and family life, of travel, of motherhood, and of aesthetic experience itself. Rita Dove, the United States Poet Laureate (occupying a post that used to be called, more accurately, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress), has recently published “Mother Love” (Norton $17.95), her sixth book of poems.
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