An introduction to Rita Dove by Grace Cavalieri
In a stunning video, Grace covers the life and work of the first female of color US Poet Laureate
"If critics look at a literary model of a balanced life, the thinking, feeling, sensual, and intuitive, this can be seen as a template for Rita Dove’s writing."
Grace Cavalieri's new web series "20th-Century Poets Commentaries" is off to a strong start with introductions and commentaries on such poets as Robert Hayden, Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, and Josephine Jacobsen.
Rita Dove, the first female of color to hold the vaunted position of US poet laureate, claims an important place in late 20th-century poetry and American history.
Her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Thomas and Beulah, Grace explains, displays her use of intuition in creating semi-biographical poems that reach, in Dove's words, to the "inner-truth."
You can support Grace's mission to create a video on every US Poet Laureate (and then some) by buying her book Other Voices, Other Lives.
All of her commentaries are produced by Forest Woods Media (a 501c3).
ASP Author’s Gift Guide for Book Lovers (PART 2)
Gift guide part 2 features Mysteries, Travel Writing, and Books about Northern California.
ASP Authors’ Gift Guide for Book Lovers
Well, it’s that time of year again, when holiday gift lists are popping up all over. Here at ASP HQ, we’re particularly interested, of course, in gifts for book-lovers, and we’ve noticed a curious fact: No matter how diverse the sources of these lists, a few titles pop up again and again. Usually these are recently published, widely reviewed best-sellers. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, gift-givers might find themselves putting one more copy of the current hot mystery, or history, or memoir under a book-loving friend’s tree.
Featured Poetry: “Burial at Shanidar” by Elizabeth Hazen
This is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.