Rita Dove’s new book of poems is among her best. The title makes it leap from the bookcase ... Dove’s books derive their force from how she so deftly stirs the everyday — insomnia, TV movies, Stilton cheese, rattling containers of pills — into her world of ideas and intellection, in poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious. Her sleepless eye for cant, necessary in all good poetry, is a bonus ... These are fighting poems ... You sense the books of many poets of Dove’s generation slipping to the back of the bookcase. Not hers.
... exquisite ... Her poems magnify the marginalized individual, simultaneously illuminating national and global failed attempts at democracy. As always, her words are raw, poignant, and accessible ... The poems she uses to divulge her daily life, managing her condition, are tender, playful, and optimistically realistic ... Once again, Dove has written a culturally astute volume packed with musicality and charm. Her eloquent honesty creates a true playlist for the apocalypse, should that relentless threat ever finally tighten its grip. Still, she respectfully declines to be dismal.
It is as if the poet of her first three books...found herself expected to show a more public profile, to take on more explicitly public concerns. She has always met these challenges with grace but not always with originality. Playlist for the Apocalypse is no different in this respect ... Dove cuts a wide swath from Keats to Neruda, and while the enemy is identified as the 'belligerent purveyors of programmed rectitude,' there is a satisfying rebellion against what might be expected in a poem. I can hear the public poet throwing off her onerous duties ... It is the final section that, for me, includes the most moving poems; even without being told we would know that these were responses to impending mortality.
These poems, in the range of histories and personalities that they invoke, resemble a playlist, a curated selection of songs from a variety of albums and artists, tracking different voices, moods, and themes. They are less about the end times than the cycles of tragedy and redemption that humans seem wired to repeat ... Dove deftly encapsulates the malaise and tumult of the last few decades that led up to the present moment ...
Dove steps back into her life and unearths resonances within herself, private moments, transforming the quiet cataclysms behind her public success into a lifetime of song.
Her eleventh collection of poetry, Playlist for the Apocalypse, feels both intricate and monumental at the same time. She continues to be what she always was: a master of blending the individual and the collective, the personal and the political ... Sprinkled throughout the book, too, are language and imagery that surprise ... I’m grateful that Dove jostled syllables and caught words for this latest collection, because Playlist for the Apocalypse is everything I’d want from her and more.
Playlist for the Apocalypse defies generalization and offers ample opportunity to appreciate Dove’s extraordinary, honed talents, especially her gift for bridging past and present through persona, her musical phrasing, and her deft handling of form. Like the best playlists, this assured collection both satisfies and surprises ... Dove’s sparkling, jewel-like images range from playful...to luscious...to knowing ... Riveting ... In the poem that is the source of the collection’s title, Shakespeare 'pens a sonnet while building / a playlist for the apocalypse.' With this book Dove, too, performs such a feat. It is a privilege to observe such a brilliant mind working through multiple difficult subjects at once, with grace and wit to spare.
... a potent and many-chambered volume showcasing the highly awarded former U.S. Poet Laureate’s signature gift for historical illumination, especially in sharp and poignant portraits of marginalized figures ... Here, too, are poems of pirouetting wit and jujitsu power about family, food, nature, memory, complacency, protest, and her own valiant battle for health. Dove is a poet of profound perspective, genius, and grace.
... commanding ... Dove finds powerful moments of grace and resistance in the lives of those who have been oppressed and silenced. These pieces get to the heart of injustice in lines as direct as they are lyrical ... Whether examining the origin of the term ghetto in 16th-century Venice or ruminating on her struggles with illness, Dove's poems hold enormous historical weight and are enriched by her curiosity and keen perceptiveness ... Dove brilliantly breathes new life into the present age, revealing it as a time for urgent change.
