![]() ![]() But then we remember that the picture of the poet is only two years past the end of the beach’s segregation, and progress-from “narrow plot” to “wide strip”-seems a fragile, fragile thing. The “meal-sack dress” on is the visual counterpoint to the bikini Trethewey’s child-self wears, which seems like symbol of progress (out of poverty, and with only the beach behind it, not the dreadful sign). A poet and writer, she was a high school Presidential Scholar and graduated with a BA in English from Miami University of Ohio in 1973. ![]() We learn that the poet’s grandmother is taking the picture in 1970-just “two years after they opened / the rest of this beach to us,” a chilling reminder of the cruelties of Jim Crow South who could deny the pleasures of this beach, with its sun and its minnows, to a child?Īnd then the end of the poem completes the structure Trethewey has set up: it’s forty years since her grandmother (to whom the second half of the poem belongs) Now the focus shifts to the “history lesson” of the poem’s title, as Trethewey takes us back in time in two jumps. Then, at precisely the poem’s midpoint, the turn: “I am alone / except for my grandmother, other side.” Take, for instance, “History Lesson.” At first, Trethewey describes a picture of herself as a small girl in a flowered bikini, toes curling in the sand “on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,” painting in vivid words the sense of the photo, and the bright sun of the day. American poet and author Rita Dove was born in Akron (city and the county seat of Summit County, Ohio, United States) on August 28th, 1952 and is 69 years old today. It’s the tremulous hope that shines brightest in Domestic Work, but it’s a hope that flutters on the edges of a terrible past and an uncertain present. In her introduction to the book, Rita Dove writes, “With a steely grace reminiscent of those eight washerwomen, she tells the hard facts of lives pursued on the margins, lived out under oppression and in scripted oblivion, with fear and a tremulous hope” (xi-xii). In both free verse and gorgeous formal poetry, these poems tell the stories of working-class African American people, focusing on men and women in the South in the twentieth century. The collection won the inaugural Cave Canem Prize (an annual prize for the best first collection of poems by an African American poet), selected by Rita Dove. 47 quotes from Rita Dove: If you cant be free, be a mystery., From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Family: She and her husband Fred Viebahn became parents to a daughter named Aviva in 1983. Her best-known works include Sonata Mulattica and The Darker Face of the Earth. Domestic Work is the first collection of poems by Natasha Trethewey, Poet Laureate of the United Sates from 2012 to 2014 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Bio Rita Dove, best known for being a Poet, was born in Akron, Ohio, USA on Thursday, August 28, 1952. ![]()
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