Thomas and Beulah

This is not my first reading and it won't be my last. Thomas and Beulah is a great love letter from the poet to her grandparents, and whether or not the stories contained are exact they provide the kind of truth that only a poet can give.

Splitting the collection into two strong Points of View, shows art dealing with opposites, male/female, light/dark, black/white -- the poems start in a place that feel deeply personal. But the great poems that start with the personal, by being specific touch on something revealing about their culture and the history. This collection has much to teach about the Northern Migration and the effects of race, economics, labor and segregation on the psyche. Worth multiple reads.

It took me less than an hour to read Thomas and Beulah from cover to cover, yet at the end I felt like I'd read a novel. I knew this couple better than they knew each other. The poems in the first half of the book tell Thomas's story, and the poems in the second half tell Beulah's story. The poems are snapshots of these characters at various points in their lives. Several of the poems are like two halves of the same coin, revealing each person's thoughts and feelings about the same event. Readers should avoid pulling an individual poem out of its context in the bigger narrative. I suggest reading the poems through in sequence, noting repeated imagery and phrases, then returning for a closer analysis of individual poems.

When I first started this, I though it terribly sad. I didn't see the connections clearly at first, but I read on. At the the end, I still believe it terribly sad, but I have a much larger picture than the mere words, by themselves, give. Life often is sad. Yet, among the sadness, one is able to pick up moments of joy. It is one of the beauties of poetry to be able to say so much in so few words. Dove's chronology in the back give it the connections to reality, but aren't necessary to see the life stories given. Probably most of the poems here could stand on their own, but they would be less by themselves. We would understand less. It would be as if one were to read only a single chapter of a novel. It's a beautiful book, one that calls show more me to reread. show less

First edition