Rita Dove

Mother Love

"This volume shows Dove—Pulitzer Prize winner, novelist, and 1993-95 U.S. Poet Laureate—at the height of her poetic powers."—Publishers Weekly

Calling upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Mother Love examines the love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter, each daughter a potential mother. In settings as various as a patio in Arizona, the bistros and boulevards of Paris, the sun-drenched pyramids of Mexico—and directly from the Greek myth itself—Rita Dove explores this relationship and the dilemma of letting go.

"Mother Love is an unsparing book. . . . Rita Dove's laser glance exposes and cauterizes its subjects in new and disturbing ways."—Helen Vendler, The New Yorker