Virginia notes: Four volumes of poetry

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. -- Edgar Allan Poe

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Beauty, indeed. Four Virginia poets -- two well-known, two not so, offer anthologies that make summer a time to savor the poetic as well as lighter reading.

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Rita Dove, the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has rightfully won honors galore, including the Pulitzer Prize, and has served as poet laureate of the United States and of Virginia.

Her 13th book, "Sonata Mulattica" (229 pages, Norton, $24.95) shows how lucky U.Va. and the commonwealth are to have her.

"Sonata Mulattica" found its origins in 1803, when violinist George Polegreen Bridgetower, the son of a white European woman and a black African man, traveled from London to Vienna to meet Ludwig von Beethoven.

From this footnote, Dove builds a book-length narrative that sings with conviction and lyric power.

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Another Pulitzer winner who teaches at U.Va., Charles Wright is known for the authority and command of his work, and his 19th book, "Sestets" (75 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $23) lives up to his reputation.

With long lines and short poems, Wright makes his impact with immediacy. Take, for instance, these lines from "Bitter Herbs to Eat, and Dipped in Honey":

"We lay out our own dark end,/guilt, and the happiness of guilt./God never enters into it, nor/Do his pale hands and pale wings,/angel of time he has become."

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The poetry of Norfolk's Shelly Wagner was born in tragedy.

On July 26, 1984, she was pushing her 5-year-old son, Andrew, in a backyard tire swing. She left him to go inside the house for a moment, and in the brief time she was gone, the child had drowned in the river behind their home.

"The Andrew Poems" (96 pages, Texas Tech University Press, $14.95) were written not as therapy, Wagner says, but to see if she could express the range of her experience. This collection was published in hardback in 1994 and has at last been reprinted in paperback.

Bereaved parents have called it a great comfort. Heartrending and unflinchingly honest, it's a work that fellow poet Walter McDonald says "makes me feel part of the struggling, lovely human tribe."

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The historical misfortunes of British women find expression in "Home Remedies" (69 pages, Louisiana State University Press, $17.95), the latest collection from Sarah Kennedy, an associate professor of English at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton who lives in Rockbridge County.

But that's not all, as Kennedy includes poems inspired by sights near her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, cable-television news reports and even a December visit to a South Carolina museum. In the latter, "At the Charleston Museum: Christmas Eve," she writes: "The skeleton/at the entrance vaguely whispers whale,/and the technology rooms' carbines murmur war."

This is powerful and topical verse. -- Jay Strafford