Abduction and Other Severe Pleasures: Rita Dove's Mother Love

Abstract

Abduction and Other Severe PleasuresRita Dove’s Mother Love Alison Booth (bio) Editor’s Note: The essays of this special section consider Rita Dove’s remarkable recent volume, Mother Love. They were presented on December 1, 1995, in the English department at the University of Virginia, by Alison Booth, Stephen Cushman, and Lotta Lofgren. Each essay approaches the volume from a different perspective, but all share a high regard for Dove’s work, a commitment to close scrutiny of its verbal textures and movements, and the energizing conviction that to write well about a poet of Dove’s achievement, one’s own words must be artfully mediated. —Mark Edmundson Rita Dove’s new book abducts me. Mother Love makes me long for abandonment. This volume lures me to loosen the critical essay. But then “one is constantly bumping up against Order” (“Foreword,” Mother Love, xii). Dove’s book makes me want to turn back and begin the two-decades’ apprenticeship to become a poet. This time, not an “acetylene Virgin,” not a self-incinerating Medea or veiled Helen, not Plath or H.D., but a cosmopolite of multicolored nails and knowledge; a poet of aplomb under the “klieg lights” of fame (The Poet’s World 99); of grace in the fearsome solitude of nights of writing. Rita Dove, like a wise but fearless daughter who has heeded many mothers’ warnings, walks straight past the obscure cellarways and neglected lots in the historical neighborhood of black women poets. In 1975, Gloria T. Hull was not wrong to suggest that black women poets were considered “Shakespeare’s half-sisters,” who had “had to ‘go it alone’ as only children or support and nurture each other in an underground sisterhood” (Shakespeare’s Sisters 165–66). But in 1995, Dove can claim a large family without fanfare: a birthright eclectic, postmodern as it plunders and mocks pedigrees, vast as the distance between Ohio and Sicily, but not precisely universal. While eluding set location or identity, she makes the claim of a feminist woman (demolishing truckers’ crude jokes or seducers’ ploys in “Blue Days” or “Hades’ Pitch”), and of an “American Black” (“Her Island”). Most markedly, Mother Love claims tradition: it is a cycle of extraordinarily-crafted sonnets (à la both Rossettis) adapting a classical myth (à la H.D., Joyce, Woolf, or other high modernists). It’s at the same time part of a tradition of worthy blasphemy; here we can talk of “poodle shit” on sidewalks (“Persephone in Hell I”) or “Tampax tubes” in dumps (“Her Island”) as aptly-colored symbols in certain sacrificial rites. It is a subversive tribute, to choose the myth of Demeter and Persephone, not Eros and Psyche or Echo and Narcissus. She reiterates one of the few classical European myths that retains more than a trace of widespread worship of a mother-goddess. Without the Victorian sentiment or Amazonian zeal that tinges some feminist revivals of the Eleusinian mysteries, Dove plunges into some of the older if not the oldest caves of this fertility myth. Her mothers and daughters (there are no single characters here), [End Page 125] more or less middle-class Americans—at times explicitly African-American—follow the actions of an ancient and diverse ancestry, such as that of the Sumerian Inanna, “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” who in some versions descends into the Underworld to find her sister Erishkigal (Baring and Cashford 192, 223–24). 1 The whole sequence of sonnets, but also chains of sonnets in the interior, follow the plot of abduction, mourner’s search and sojourn in hell, and eventual seasonal recurrence. Just to follow a row of sonnets in Books I and II, for example, we see first the pastoral moment—plucking or becoming the plucked narcissus or poppy in a field or garden party in “Heroes” or “Party Dress for a First Born”: “Tonight men stride like elegant scissors across the lawn / to the women arrayed there, petals waiting to loosen.” Then in the next poem, abduction: “It is finished. No one heard her / . . . This is how one foot sinks into the ground” (“Persephone, Falling”). Next Demeter’s abandonment to grief: “Blown apart by loss, she let herself go” (“The...