#8. Mother Love, by Rita Dove

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#8. Mother Love, Rita Dove

1995, W.W. Norton & Co.

 

The title of this book rhymes with the author's name, which must be unintentional but which for some reason I can't get out of my mind.

 

This is the first book, the first thing really, I have read by Rita Dove. My first reaction upon finishing it was that I liked it, I admired it or many things in it, but ultimately I didn't think it held together as a book, with the arc of the story that it is claiming to tell.

 

I have been thinking about it for two or three weeks now, though, and I keep on thinking about it, and now I have started reading the book again. There is a lot to return to there. So I have to say it is growing on me, and all in all may be a richer and more lasting work than I had initially thought.

 

The theme of the book, despite its title, is not really mothering qua mothering. It is the myth of Demeter and Persephone, focusing on these principal players -- which itself bears remarking, because there are many treatments of the myth that pay attention instead to the way the story affects the (male, it must be said) gods around them. (The story, in brief, is this: while gathering flowers, young Persephone wanders away from her friends and is kidnapped to Hell by Hades, king of the underworld. He wants her to marry him and be his wife. Demeter, her mother, the goddess of growth and harvest, goes on strike and lets the world wither -- an action of anger? grief? or both? -- until Zeus, king of the gods (and brother to both Hades and Demeter) makes Hades return Persephone. But Persephone has eaten six seeds of a pomegranate down there, so for six months of the year she must go under the earth to sleep with Hades and be queen in Hell, and the other six months she may rejoin her mother above ground. And this, says the myth, is why we have winter.)

 

Dove in these poems -- which are split into seven chapters or cycles or sections -- is interested in mothers' feelings about their daughters; in kidnapped children; in seeking the various gateways to Hell; about how this act might play out, in different or modern scenery (including one section in which, with rather amazing and interesting effrontery, she analogizes her own rakish youthful time in Paris as "Persephone in Hell": exploring narrow alleys, dark arcades, expatriate cocktail parties, and sex; I think she also implies that in this understanding the gateway to Hell may be variously a Metro station, or the pit of the Centre Pompidou, which is a pretty amazing conceit to pull off).

 

I also especially like the last section, which is entitled "Her Island," and which seems to be about the narrator and her husband on a tourist quest to find the ancient temples and the ancient site of the Hell's-mouth lake associated with the Persephone myth.

 

All in all, I conclude that this is pretty solid. And I keep returning to it. I think if you have any interest in how poets or contemporary storytellers draw on or remake the stuff of classical myth, you are likely to find this book worth reading. Especially if you are interested in the girls' side.

 

Here are a few excerpts from the pieces in the book:
 

from "Demeter, Waiting"
 

No. Who can bear it. ...

She is gone again and I will not bear

it, I will drag my grief through a winter

of my own making and refuse

any meadow that recycles itself into

hope. Shit on the cicadas, dry meteor

flash, finicky butterflies! I will wail and thrash

until the whole goddamned golden panorama freezes

over. Then I will sit down to wait for her. Yes.

 

"Used"

 

The conspiracy's to make us thin. Size threes

are all the rage, and skirts ballooning above twinkling knees

are every man-child's preadolescent dream.

Tabula rasa. No slate's that clean --

 

we've earned the navels sunk in grief

when the last child emptied us of their brief

interior light. Our muscles say We have been used.

 

Have you ever tried silk sheets? I did,

persuaded by postnatal dread

and a Macy's clerk to bargain for more zip.

We couldn't hang on, slipped

to the floor and by morning the quilts

had slid off, too. Enough of guilt --

It's hard work staying cool.

 

"Rusks"

 

This is how it happened.

 

Spring wore on my nerves --

all that wheezing and dripping

while others in galasohes

reaped compost and seemed

enamored most of the time.

 

Why should I be select?

 

I got tired of tearing myself down.

Let someone else have

the throne of blues for a while,

let someone else suffer mosquitoes.

As my mama always said:

half a happiness is better

than none at goddam all.