Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama by Therese Steffen (review)

Abstract

Robinson, Richard Powers, Emily Prager,and Alison Lurie all springto mind. Not nearly enough work is being done on this strandof contemporarywriting;Varvogli is an honourable exception to the rule. UNIVERSITY OFNOTTINGHAM JUDIENEWMAN Crossing Color: Transcultural SpaceandPlacein RitaDove'sPoetry, Fiction,andDrama.By THERESE STEFFEN.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 200I. Xiii + 239 PP. ?26.50. ISBN:0-I9-513440-0. In this much needed firstfull-lengthstudyof Rita Dove's work, Therese Steffenhas done a marvellousjob in respondingto and presentingin a scholarlyway the diversity and creative range of one of America'sforemost contemporaryliterarytalents. As a poet, Dove has become a high-profilename in Americanculturewith a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post,and Steffen's reading is enhanced with reference to the many interviews, readings, and media appearances that Dove has given, particularly during her tenure as Poet Laureate from I993 to I995. The book concludes with a transcriptof Steffen'sown extended interviewwith Dove, a valuable addition to the record. Dove's determination not to be typecast as a black writer, or a black woman writerwas an unusual and individualstand at the time in which she began writing in the I97os. This refusal to be corralledwithin the Black Arts Movement is one of the transculturalcrossings that Steffen explores, arguing that Dove is one of the initiators of the 'trend toward a mainstream pluriculturalnational identity' (p. 9). Her Pulitzerprize-winningpoem, Thomas andBeulah(1987),loosely based on the lives of her grandparents,was notable in expressing how the black migration from the rural south to the industrializednorth in the early years of the twentieth century was bound up in the American Dream, that this historyis part of American history. Dove mainstreamed the narrative without losing anything of its specific human particularity. Perhaps the most significant and surprisingcrossing has been to Europe. Like HenryJames before her, Dove has entered into the complex fate of the Europeanized American. Crossingthe Atlantic, as she frequentlydoes, by ocean liner, it is a passage that has given her, in Steffen's phrase, 'artistic enspacement' (p. 28). Steffen is particularlyinsightfulon the poetry based on Dove's German experience (Dove was a postgraduate student in Germany, and she subsequently married a German writer).The exploration of the affinitieswith Rilke, the 'pluralityof connotations' (p. 94) that groupsof poems with a German topographyaccrue, is excellentlydone. It is indeed notjust Europeanbut internationalground in a more culturallyexpansive , and at times more conflicted, sense thanJames's that Dove's poetry invokes. Her historicaland geographicallocales cross from medieval Siena to Montgomery, Alabama, from Tel Aviv toJerusalem, biblical and modern. Steffen has sought a flexible composite theoretical approach that encompasses Dove's cultural crossings, a combination of European and African-American perspectives.She draws, interalia,on Gaston Bachelard's ThePoetics of Space(trans. by MariaJolas (Boston:Beacon Press, I994)),a text Dove herselfdescribesas imaginatively fruitful in The Poet's World(Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1995), and linksthis conceptualfieldwith the linguisticworkof African-Americantheorists Robinson, Richard Powers, Emily Prager,and Alison Lurie all springto mind. Not nearly enough work is being done on this strandof contemporarywriting;Varvogli is an honourable exception to the rule. UNIVERSITY OFNOTTINGHAM JUDIENEWMAN Crossing Color: Transcultural SpaceandPlacein RitaDove'sPoetry, Fiction,andDrama.By THERESE STEFFEN.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 200I. Xiii + 239 PP. ?26.50. ISBN:0-I9-513440-0. In this much needed firstfull-lengthstudyof Rita Dove's work, Therese Steffenhas done a marvellousjob in respondingto and presentingin a scholarlyway the diversity and creative range of one of America'sforemost contemporaryliterarytalents. As a poet, Dove has become a high-profilename in Americanculturewith a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post,and Steffen's reading is enhanced with reference to the many interviews, readings, and media appearances that Dove has given, particularly during her tenure as Poet Laureate from I993 to I995. The book concludes with a transcriptof Steffen'sown extended interviewwith Dove, a valuable addition to the record. Dove's determination not to be typecast as a black writer, or a black woman writerwas an unusual and individualstand at the time in which she began writing in the I97os. This refusal to be corralledwithin the Black Arts Movement is one of the transculturalcrossings that Steffen explores, arguing that...