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Grace Notes: Poems
With this her fourth book of poems, Rita Dove expands her role as a leading voice in contemporary American letters. The title of the collection serves as an umbrella for the intimate concerns expressed in the forty-eight poems; in music, grace notes are those added to the basic melody, the embellishments that―if played or sung at the right moment with just the right touch―can break your heart.
Isn't this what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks as she explored autobiographical events, most from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then turns to the shadowy areas of regret and memory. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.
Isn't this what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks as she explored autobiographical events, most from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then turns to the shadowy areas of regret and memory. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.
90 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1990
1 person is currently reading
130 people want to read
About the author
Rita Dove
97 books256 followersRita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and musician, lives in Charlottesville, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 13, 2023
What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
A perfect collection for a Sunday afternoon, a week’s holiday resting on the frontal lobe. Stacks of books celebrate both a bountiful trip and the birthdays which transpired, wordless. Stalin will wait. These leery points of contact are enough to sustain. Dove wears that sensibility well. Forty-eight poems here, two echo across mortality. Certain metaphors are enviscerated. There’s always a surfeit of baggage.
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
A perfect collection for a Sunday afternoon, a week’s holiday resting on the frontal lobe. Stacks of books celebrate both a bountiful trip and the birthdays which transpired, wordless. Stalin will wait. These leery points of contact are enough to sustain. Dove wears that sensibility well. Forty-eight poems here, two echo across mortality. Certain metaphors are enviscerated. There’s always a surfeit of baggage.
May 20, 2014
Highly autobiographical poems about the incidents in a poet's life have little appeal for me because I do not know enough about the content of that life for the poem to be meaningful to me. Many love this kind of poetry, poetry about which they are surely as in the dark as I. To such people, I say, enjoy. Though there were two or three poems that escaped this low orbit, I shall not trouble Ms. Dove again.
January 26, 2016
Good stuff.
The poems that stand out, for me:
"Particulars"
"Your Death"
"Dedication"
"Ars Poetica"
"Canary" - about Billie Holiday
"Old Folks' Home, Jerusalem"
The poems that stand out, for me:
"Particulars"
"Your Death"
"Dedication"
"Ars Poetica"
"Canary" - about Billie Holiday
"Old Folks' Home, Jerusalem"
March 13, 2023
Beautiful verse written with poignant purpose. Dove's use of imagery as metaphor is masterful, though at times felt a little opaque (of course intentional), which made for a challenging reading at times; incredible collection from one of the U.S.A.'s most influential contemporary poets!
May 11, 2015
As a novice, Rita Dove's poems were very challenging to me. Another reviewer said that her poems were so autobiographical that he couldn't enjoy her poems--or something to that effect. I guess that's what is going on here. While I thought the writing was great, I couldn't understand a lot. I think it will take a long time and a lot of close reading to "get them." I like my poems like Tootsie pops, a few licks and you get to the center. These poems were like jawbreakers, hard, and not much reward besides the sweet cinnamon coating left over. The process of consuming these poems are not ones I really want to start.
Nevertheless there were lines and poems that stuck out.
My favorite poem is "The Wake," which starts out with this: "Your absence distributed itself like an invitation. Friends and relatives kept coming, trying to fill up the house."
"Watching Last Year at Marienbad at Roger Haggerty's House in Auburn, Alabama" has this image in its second stanza: "I walk the block past / Krogers with its exhausted wives / hovering over bins of frozen pork."
"Crickets too awake in choirs," she writes in "Turning Thirty, I Contemplate Students Bicycling Home."
In "Particulars," she opens with "She discovered she felt better if the simplest motions had their origin in agenda." It's "up there" in the echelon of favorite poems from this book.
"Horse and Tree" had this clever line (which I won't quote in full): "why children might fear a carousel at first for the way it insists that life is round."
"The Breathing, The Endless News" has these lines: "Children know this: they are the trailings of gods. Their eyes hold nothing at birth then fill slowly with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls, out for the count, each toe pouting from the slumped-over toddler clothes."
The last poem, Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem, had the following line: "The night air is minimalist, a needlepoint with raw moon as signature." It also talked of "my sandal's inconsequential crunch."
Despite the challenge, I liked this early 1990s release because I saw what can be done with poetry: the forms, the stanzas, the imagery.
Perhaps more seasoned close readers and poets can understand these poems--or they can pretend.
Nevertheless there were lines and poems that stuck out.
My favorite poem is "The Wake," which starts out with this: "Your absence distributed itself like an invitation. Friends and relatives kept coming, trying to fill up the house."
"Watching Last Year at Marienbad at Roger Haggerty's House in Auburn, Alabama" has this image in its second stanza: "I walk the block past / Krogers with its exhausted wives / hovering over bins of frozen pork."
"Crickets too awake in choirs," she writes in "Turning Thirty, I Contemplate Students Bicycling Home."
In "Particulars," she opens with "She discovered she felt better if the simplest motions had their origin in agenda." It's "up there" in the echelon of favorite poems from this book.
"Horse and Tree" had this clever line (which I won't quote in full): "why children might fear a carousel at first for the way it insists that life is round."
"The Breathing, The Endless News" has these lines: "Children know this: they are the trailings of gods. Their eyes hold nothing at birth then fill slowly with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls, out for the count, each toe pouting from the slumped-over toddler clothes."
The last poem, Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem, had the following line: "The night air is minimalist, a needlepoint with raw moon as signature." It also talked of "my sandal's inconsequential crunch."
Despite the challenge, I liked this early 1990s release because I saw what can be done with poetry: the forms, the stanzas, the imagery.
Perhaps more seasoned close readers and poets can understand these poems--or they can pretend.
February 21, 2016
Beautiful collection of poems, some directly correlating to the title, "Grace Notes." Indeed, Dove covers topics from old folks in a nursing home to sex talks with her daughter, from an atheist confessing of her disbelief to her lover to grieving the death of a loved one. The subjects are daring, raw, evocatively depicted.
Some of her poems left unaddressed issues with me after reading. "Horse and Tree," for instance, made broad statements and did not fully embrace or marry the two images like the first stanza intimated it would. I found it hard to digest that a three-year-old would probe her mother every month about periods in "After Reading. ..." Some enjambments were jarring, though others were beautiful.
My favorite line in this book comes from "Your Death": "and the day changed ownership." The idea of death sanctifying a day, claiming every detail and aspect of a day, so beautifully depicted in the scene of shopping at Bloomingdale's; even eating a sandwich is hijacked by death. Rita Dove gives her reader much to mull over.
Some of her poems left unaddressed issues with me after reading. "Horse and Tree," for instance, made broad statements and did not fully embrace or marry the two images like the first stanza intimated it would. I found it hard to digest that a three-year-old would probe her mother every month about periods in "After Reading. ..." Some enjambments were jarring, though others were beautiful.
My favorite line in this book comes from "Your Death": "and the day changed ownership." The idea of death sanctifying a day, claiming every detail and aspect of a day, so beautifully depicted in the scene of shopping at Bloomingdale's; even eating a sandwich is hijacked by death. Rita Dove gives her reader much to mull over.
April 27, 2007
very good precise poems, practical and beautiful. a special voice with a special ear for place.
Read
January 18, 2013Brilliant. BRILLIANT. Maybe even sidling up next to Ted Kooser in my heart. Maybe I and the Library of Congress are on the same page as far as favorite poets?
January 20, 2022
We learned about the state tree
in school - its fruit
so useless, so ugly
no one bothered to
commend the smudge trunk
nor the slim leaves shifting
over our heads. Yet
they were a good thing to kick
along gutters
on the way home,
though they stank like
a drunk's piss in the roads
where cars had smashed
them. And in autumn
when the shiny helmets split
open,
there was the bald
seed with its wheat-
coloured eye.
We loved
the modest countenance beneath
that leathery cap.
We, too, did not want to leave
our mothers.
We piled them up
for ammunition.
We lay down
with them
among the bruised leaves
so that we could
rise, shining.
* * *
A letter from my mother was waiting:
read in standing, one a.m.,
just arrived at my German mother-in-law
six hours from Paris by car.
Our daughter hops on Oma's bed,
happy to be back in a language
she knows. Hello, all! Your postcard
came on the nineth - familiar misspelled
words, exclamations. I wish my body
wouldn't cramp and leak; I want to -
as my daughter says, pretending to be
"Papa" - pull on boots and go for a long walk
alone. Your cousin Ronnie in D.C. -
remember him? - he was the one
a few months younger than you -
was strangulated at some chili joint,
your Aunt May is beside herself!
Mom skips to the garden which is
producing - onions, swiss chard,
lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, turnip greens and more lettuce
so far! The roses are flourishing.
Haven't I always hated gardening? And German,
with its patient, grunting building blocks,
and for that matter, English, too,
Americanese's chewy twang? Raccoons
have taken up residence
we were ten in the crawl space
but I can't feel his hand who knows
anymore how we'll get them out?
I'm still standing. Bags to unpack.
That's all for now. Take care.
* * *
This is the weather of change
and clear light. This is
weather on its B side,
askew, that propels
the legs of young men
in tight jeans wheeling
through the tired, wise
spring. Crickets too
awake in choirs
out of sight, although
I imagine we see
the same thing
and for a long way.
This, then, weather
to start over.
Evening rustles
her skirts of sulky
organza. Skin
prickles, defining
what is and shall not be....
How private
the complaint of these
green hills.
* * *
Ignore me. This request is knotted -
I'm not ashamed to admit it.
I won't promise anything. I am a magic
that can deafen you like a rainstorm or a well.
I am clear on introductions, the five minute flirt,
the ending of old news.
Broken colour, this kind of wanting,
its tawdriness, its awkward uncertainties.
Once there was a hill thick with red maples
and a small brook
emerging from black briars.
There was quiet: no wind
to snatch the cries of bids flung above
where I sat and didn't know you yet.
What are music or books if not ways
to trap us in rumours? The freedom of fine cages!
I did not want bad music, I did not want
faulty scholarship; I wanted only to know
what I had missed, early on -
that ironic half-salute of the truly lost.
* * *
I've got to go
down where my eye
can't reach
hairy star
who forgets to shiver
forgets the cool suck
inside
Someday long
off someone will
see me
fling me up
until I hook
into sky
drop his memory
My hair
dry water
* * *
Billie Holiday's burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the guardenia her signature under that ruined face.
(Now you're cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)
Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.
If you can't be free, be a mystery.
in school - its fruit
so useless, so ugly
no one bothered to
commend the smudge trunk
nor the slim leaves shifting
over our heads. Yet
they were a good thing to kick
along gutters
on the way home,
though they stank like
a drunk's piss in the roads
where cars had smashed
them. And in autumn
when the shiny helmets split
open,
there was the bald
seed with its wheat-
coloured eye.
We loved
the modest countenance beneath
that leathery cap.
We, too, did not want to leave
our mothers.
We piled them up
for ammunition.
We lay down
with them
among the bruised leaves
so that we could
rise, shining.
- The Buckeye, pg. 9-10
* * *
A letter from my mother was waiting:
read in standing, one a.m.,
just arrived at my German mother-in-law
six hours from Paris by car.
Our daughter hops on Oma's bed,
happy to be back in a language
she knows. Hello, all! Your postcard
came on the nineth - familiar misspelled
words, exclamations. I wish my body
wouldn't cramp and leak; I want to -
as my daughter says, pretending to be
"Papa" - pull on boots and go for a long walk
alone. Your cousin Ronnie in D.C. -
remember him? - he was the one
a few months younger than you -
was strangulated at some chili joint,
your Aunt May is beside herself!
Mom skips to the garden which is
producing - onions, swiss chard,
lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, turnip greens and more lettuce
so far! The roses are flourishing.
Haven't I always hated gardening? And German,
with its patient, grunting building blocks,
and for that matter, English, too,
Americanese's chewy twang? Raccoons
have taken up residence
we were ten in the crawl space
but I can't feel his hand who knows
anymore how we'll get them out?
I'm still standing. Bags to unpack.
That's all for now. Take care.
- Poem in Which I Refuse Contemplation, pg. 19-20
* * *
This is the weather of change
and clear light. This is
weather on its B side,
askew, that propels
the legs of young men
in tight jeans wheeling
through the tired, wise
spring. Crickets too
awake in choirs
out of sight, although
I imagine we see
the same thing
and for a long way.
This, then, weather
to start over.
Evening rustles
her skirts of sulky
organza. Skin
prickles, defining
what is and shall not be....
How private
the complaint of these
green hills.
- Turning Thirty, I Contemplate Students Bicycling Home, pg. 30
* * *
Ignore me. This request is knotted -
I'm not ashamed to admit it.
I won't promise anything. I am a magic
that can deafen you like a rainstorm or a well.
I am clear on introductions, the five minute flirt,
the ending of old news.
Broken colour, this kind of wanting,
its tawdriness, its awkward uncertainties.
Once there was a hill thick with red maples
and a small brook
emerging from black briars.
There was quiet: no wind
to snatch the cries of bids flung above
where I sat and didn't know you yet.
What are music or books if not ways
to trap us in rumours? The freedom of fine cages!
I did not want bad music, I did not want
faulty scholarship; I wanted only to know
what I had missed, early on -
that ironic half-salute of the truly lost.
- Dedication, after Czesław Miłosz, pg. 47
* * *
I've got to go
down where my eye
can't reach
hairy star
who forgets to shiver
forgets the cool suck
inside
Someday long
off someone will
see me
fling me up
until I hook
into sky
drop his memory
My hair
dry water
- Medusa, pg. 55
* * *
Billie Holiday's burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the guardenia her signature under that ruined face.
(Now you're cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)
Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.
If you can't be free, be a mystery.
- Canary, for Michael S. Harper, pg. 64
Read
February 9, 2019i had to rush through this one in order to return it to the library but i was not moved by anything i read. it seems like a work that needs to be sat with, so i won’t rate it based on my quick read. there were a couple of lines that jumped out like “if you can’t be free, be a mystery” from Canary but not enough for me to want to revisit
January 5, 2021
My first foray into Rita Dove's early work. She's clearly on an elevated plain, contemplative and not holding back between all the poems and their themes. A book filled with literary and historical references, but deeply personal, Grace Notes is the type of volume that holds up decades after its publication, while also feeling mature and wise through age.
Read
December 30, 2024Rita Dove writes like music—concision and quiet, placed elegance, words that turn like smooth wet stones off a riverbed, images that slide down your throat like a warm spoon of oil. An uncannily gifted poet.
September 20, 2018
I really loved this collection. I don't know how to write about poetry but it was beautiful and surprising on every page.
October 14, 2018
Would still be worth four stars if it only had "Crab-Boil," "Canary," and "Poem in which I Refuse Contemplation."
November 16, 2018
Not my favorite collection of Rita Dove’s, but there are some memorable images and lines in here.
February 12, 2024
Such a broad scope in these poems, but I loved them all.
February 26, 2024
I've read a few of her collections this year, and this is by far my favorite.
July 30, 2025
“Every god is lonely”
August 28, 2016
I liked this book of poems. It didn't blow me away but it was excellent. Rita Dove is a former poet laureate, Iowa MFA graduate. So she's good in a way that's good. These are meat and potato poems. They're not in a style that gets in my blood, but they're as solid as an oak tree. Speaking of which, here's a great line: "Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree--/or ride one, hair blown to froth./That's why horses were invented, and saddles/tooled with singular stars.//This is why we braid their harsh manes/as if they were children, why children/might fear a carousel at first for the way/it insists that life is round."
from "Horse and Tree"
from "Horse and Tree"
June 10, 2010
Igwang saro na gibo daa nin poet lauriat—baad may mga appetizer an tula niya, o igwang epigraphs kada chapter ninda—dangan haralabaon an iba, o an pira pinangararan niya sa amiga; mas gwapa kun raging an mga tsismis sa iba—dai ka mangalas, garo mahihinggustuhan ka.
Read
January 14, 2014I'm not into poetry but this works for me
March 22, 2021
I loved a few of these. Quite a few I felt I wasn't smart enough to understand or they were referring to things I didn't know about.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews