Product Description

A dazzling new collection by a much-celebrated former Poet Laureate of the United States. In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos," which probes the private griefs and dreams of a working-class family, to the emblematic grace of a living legend like Rosa Parks, who acquiesced to public life in order to "serve the public good," these poems explore the intersection of individual fates with the grand arc of history. If there are heroes, Dove maintains, they continually reinvent themselves, as each of us must do every morning. As always with Rita Dove, there are stories --ghost tales and cautionary allegories ("The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians"), anecdotes and the historical moment reexamined ("The Enactment"). We get the lowdown nitty-gritty from a jitterbug queen ("Black on a Saturday Nightz"), eavesdrop on a child's whisperings ("I Cut My Finger Once on Purpose"), and experience the awakening of a bored teenager to the world of books. Whether parable or meditation, confession or praise, these poems remind us just how infinitely various a creature the human being is.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #701781 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Amazon.com Review
If you find memoirs more immediate than contemporary poetry, novels more compelling, history more vivid, then you haven't read Rita Dove. A former poet laureate of the United States, Dove is at the height of her powers in On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Her range is extraordinary. The opening "Cameos" sequence reads like a compressed colloquial epic of one hard-up but lively family--Lucille with her "bright and bitter" eyes, her wandering husband, Joe, their bookish son and seven daughters ("their / names fantastic, myriad / as the points of a chandelier"). There are magnificent occasional pieces--"Incarnation in Phoenix" on breastfeeding a newborn ("I'm not ready for this motherhood stuff"); "Against Self-Pity" ("pure misery a luxury /one never learns to enjoy"); "The First Book" ("Dig in: / You'll never reach bottom"). "Rosa," the centerpiece of the title sequence, reads almost like haiku as Dove captures Rosa Parks's historic act of refusal in 12 taut lines.

And then there are poems that stand alone for their unique electrifying strangeness: "The Venus of Willendorf," in which Dove ponders the ancient sacred mystery of man's worship of the female body, and "Lady Freedom Among Us," in which Freedom is incarnated as a bag lady--"she who has brought mercy back into the streets / and will not retire politely to the potter's field."

Of the many notes that Dove hits in this volume, the most welcome is pure unadulterated delight, as in "Dawn Revisited": "Imagine you wake up / with a second chance..." Imagine: Dove has done the hard part. All we have to do is open this splendid volume, sit back, and enjoy the ride. --David Laskin

From Publishers Weekly
Dove's brillianceAas with all great writersAis inextricable from her formal gifts: her poems effortlessly suggest grand narratives and American myths, yet ground themselves tersely in localities, characters, practicalities and particulars. This seventh collection leads off with a Dove specialty, the historical sequence: her "Cameos" lend broad, social relevance to an intermittently abandoned Depression-era wife and her family. As in Alice Munro's fiction, slight notations of near-undetectable actions are keys to deep emotional transformation: "Now she just/ enjoys, and excess/ hardens on her like/ a shell./ She sheens." In subsequent poems such as "Testimonial" and "Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967," Dove revisits precocious origins ("I was pirouette and flourish,/ I was filigree and flame") and traces, with her characteristically strong enjambments, an emerging sexuality: "how her body felt/ tender and fierce, all at once." And as with the Pulitzer Prize-winning sonnets of Thomas and Beulah (no sonnets this time out), the reader follows the poet's imagined rituals and movementsA"each night the bed creaking/ cast onto the waves/ each dawn rose flaunting/ their loose tongues of flame"Aonly to come squarely back to earth in the title section: "Not even my own grandmother would pity me;/ instead she'd suck her teeth at the sorry sight/ of some Negro actually looking for misery.// Well. I'd go home if I knew where to get off." Readers will find that this is the place.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Yes, former poet laureate Dove puts us on the bus with Rosa Parks--and brings us together with countless other African American women who endure life's bruises, large and small, with immense dignity. Whatever her subject--and the range is immense, from breast-feeding to travel to her horror of self-pity--Dove is epic in emotion, lyric in her precise, jewel-like lines.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Don't judge a book by its title...
At first glance, one may think this book to be a collection of poems dealing with the civil rights movement. Dove illustrates her poetic talent, however, by writing about the struggles in the lives of her fictional characters. In fact, the only references to Rosa Parks are in the chapter named after the book itself. But by looking beneath the surface of Dove's poems, it becomes clear to the reader why "On the Bus With Rosa Parks" is a very appropriate title. Rita Dove uses Rosa Parks as a sort of personification of the recurring themes in the poems. Rosa Parks represents hope, living life to its fullest, and the idea of ordinary people overcoming adversity to do something extraordinary. It's wrong to downplay this work and say Dove was too young to accurately illustrate Rosa Parks' effect on the Civil Rights Movement. For one thing, I think we all know of her significance, no matter what age or race we are. But also, a reader of this book needs to look past the title and see that this is not just about Rosa Parks, it outlines *human* struggle, not just African American struggle. I highly recommend it...

Joining Rita's Bus
This collection of poems is a fun variety of rhythm, imagery and humour. I found this collection a great daily read.

The first set of poems, "Cameos" are wonderful snapshots of the African American community. Dove does something that is very difficult and takes on the voice of different generations and genders in the same family to let us see inside the group. July 1925 had a great story. "Night" had a great rhythm and "Lake Erie" had wonderful unusual imagery.

As the collection progresses we move to more stand alone poems but they are all there to create new voices. She does what a good poet wants and takes a common theme and makes it new. A perfect example is "Parlor." We are dealing with death but with a bit of humour in the background.

The later poems are from a series on civil rights and Rosa Parks and are just as intriguing as the earlier voices, the views of a culture different from my own.

I took away from this collection that it was not a book about civil rights as so many thought from the title. But that it is a book about "Riding the Bus with Rosa Parks" in the sense that the African American community, especially the female sector, want to join that tradition and to honor what it means to be a part of the sector of the community.

If you want to read a very talented poet then I strongly suggest this collection. As noted, it isn't a collection soley focusing on civil rights. It is an anthology of unique voices.

Rita Dove at her best
Rita Dove displays a range of poetic devices and a power of lyrical language that is truly amazing. Although she's black, she speaks to everybody, even an old-fashioned white guy like me.