Houston Chronicle Sunday

History and mortality are in play in ‘Playlist for the Apocalypse’

- By Dwight Garner NEW YORK TIMES

It’s incumbent on the author of a good book to provide an apt title. Would we feel the same way about Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust” if it were called, as he once considered, “Malpractic­e in the Dust”?

“Playlist for the Apocalypse,” Rita Dove’s new book of poems, is among her best. The title makes it leap from the bookcase. It’s about life in what she calls this “shining, blistered republic.”

It’s about the weight of American history, which Dove treats as news we’re still actively metabolizi­ng. It’s about mortality. This book is the first time the poet has publicly acknowledg­ed that she has — and has had for more than 20 years — a form of multiple sclerosis.

It’s about family, food and front porches, too. 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.

Dove has written about how she feels most alive at night, liking to write from midnight to 5 a.m. It’s surprising then to find so many aubades — morning poems — in “Playlist for the Apocalypse.”

One of the best, “Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spacedout tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously — famously in my house, anyway — wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”

As the poem continues, the speaker senses he is riding “a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave / of the goddamn century, the East River / twerking her bedazzled behind.”

He checks out women as he glides along, stealing what Jim Harrison used to call a “fanny glance.” In another poem, “From the Sidelines,” women return the gaze. It’s about watching “one righteous integer of cool cruising down a great-lipped / channel of hushed adoration, women turned girls / again, brightenin­g in spite of themselves.”

One poem is told from the perspectiv­e of Henry Martin, who was said to be Thomas Jefferson’s mixedrace grandson. Others have titles including “Girls on the Town, 1946” (“the dimples are / extra currency, though you take care to keep / powder from caking those charmed valleys”) and “Elevator Man, 1949,” about a clever Black man shunted into a dismal job (“he was a bubble of bad air / in a closed system”) because of his race.

There are poems about the assassinat­ions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali (“Black man’s got no business being / both pretty and bold”) and Barack Obama (“Ladies and Gents, the unimaginab­le / is open for business!”). A few of these more specifical­ly historical poems, such as the ones about Watergate and Roe v. Wade, are lax.

Here are the first 21 lines of “Family Reunion,” a resonant poem about, among other things, class, family, the Great Migration, code switching and the consolatio­ns of the table:

Thirty seconds into the barbecue, my Cleveland cousins have everyone speaking Southern—broadened vowels and dropped consonants, whoops and caws.

It’s more osmosis than magic, a sliding thrall back to a time when working the tire factories meant entire neighborho­ods coming up from Georgia or Tennessee, accents helplessly intact— while their children, inflection­s flattened to match the field they thought they were playing on, knew without asking when it was safe to roll out a drawl … just as it’s understood “potluck” means resurrecti­ng the food we’ve abandoned along the way for the sake of sleeker thighs.

The final section of “Playlist for the Apocalypse” is titled “Little Book of Woe,” and it addresses the author’s health troubles. The book’s endnotes give the entire story.

After the lower half of her body suddenly went numb in the shower in 1997, there were early prediction­s of progressiv­e immobility. There were years of anxiety and depression. Dove, who is now 68, eventually got a diagnosis of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, and medication­s keep symptoms somewhat at bay.

Dove has written often about her predilecti­on for dancing, and ballroom dancing, she says here, helped her relearn to walk steadily. She feels lucky to have a “semblance of my old healthy life back,” even if she can no longer reliably write her poems by hand.

In a poem titled “Soup,” when a doctor tells her the bad news, all the speaker can think of is making a pot. (Alas, she adds, there is “the swift metallic smack / of too much thyme administer­ed hastily, / the kind of mistake you never make again”).

In “Blues, Straight,” Dove writes, “I just find myself on pause— / paused for longer than is / proper.” The poem ends: “Strange, I know, to wish / for nothing. A day / to live through. A scream.”

These are fighting poems. Dove understand­s that retreat can lead to rout. Yet a poem titled “No Color” has this crushing ending: “I never thought / I’d find relief / in the old joke that it’s always darkest / before it goes pitch black, / but at least then / it will be dark and then / thank god, black.”

You sense the books of many poets of Dove’s generation slipping to the back of the bookcase. Not hers.

 ?? Damon Winter / New York Times ?? Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate, will make a livestream appearance with Inprint Houston at 7 p.m. Aug. 30; admission is $5. Visit inprinthou­ston.org for details.
Damon Winter / New York Times Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate, will make a livestream appearance with Inprint Houston at 7 p.m. Aug. 30; admission is $5. Visit inprinthou­ston.org for details.
 ??  ?? ‘Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems’ By Rita Dove
W.W. Norton & Co.
114 pages, $26.95
‘Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems’ By Rita Dove W.W. Norton & Co. 114 pages, $26.95

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