Rita_Dove

Rita Dove To Understand Content, Not Interpret Rita Dove, the second African-American women to win the Pulitzer prize, is often criticized for her complex writing style. The following paragraphs focus on specifics of her writing by analyzing three pieces of poetry written by Rita Dove. The works discussed are “In the Old Neighborhood,” “My Mother Enters the Work Force,” and “The Bistro Styx.” Through these three works you will see examples of Rita Dove’s various renditions of the use of “home,” figurative devices such as similes and metaphors, and her view on adolences (although we will not discuss those poems). While examining "In the Old Neighborhood," readers deduce a number of things from the overall poem. The speakers in Dove’s poems are not usually at ease with their surroundings, and they tend to look upon scenes of home as seen through a distant and dispassionate eye. Dove’s home seems alien to her. Even the flowers are strangers. While analyzing the poem farther, readers see that Dove uses her views of home to further alienate the familiar picture of that typical suburban home. She talks of the house in a manner that would indicate it is a photographic negative; this emphasizes race as an dove, rita, home, mother, dove’s, figurative, poem, writing, styx, language, bistro, works, work, while, through, poems, persephone, old, neighborhood, force, enters, three, metaphors, demeter, time, similes, sense, seems, readers, personification, heavily, great, examples, elements, analyzing, vivid