Grace Notes: Poems

In her fourth collection of poems, Dove harvests ripe fruits of the self. Her best lyrics are spare, intense and deeply personal, such as ``Pastoral,'' about breastfeeding her baby, or ``The Wake,'' which begins: ``Your absence distributed itself / like an invitation. / Friends and relatives / keep coming, trying / to fill up the house.'' There are family snapshots etched in memory, sketches of a Midwestern girlhood, of evenings in Jerusalem, of her small daughter struggling to comprehend as her mother details the facts of life. Dove, a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner and associate editor of Callaloo , a journal of Afro-American arts, offers an appreciation of Billie Holiday's voice that is also a meditation on the mythification of women. Her poems blend chiseled imagery, everyday observation, private dramas, political comment. (Oct.)