Like any great dancer, Rita Dove makes things look easy. Of course, Dove is a poet, but fittingly, her new book of poems, American Smooth, is about dancing. American Smooth, as Dove defines it in the frontispiece is:

A form of ballroom dancing derived from the traditional Standard dances (e.g., Waltz, Fox Trot, Tango), in which the partners are free to release each other from the closed embrace and dance without any physical contact, thus permitting improvisation and individual expression.

True to her own definition, Dove has threaded together a collection of poems tied by movement, rhythm, music, and flight-the elements of dance-and yet she frequently departs from the dance floor. With improvisational surefootedness, she is also biblical, historical, and personal. The poems in this collection are smooth; but more than anything, though, these poems are American-whatever multifaceted meaning that word has-and it is this American-ness that Dove is interested in exploring.

American Smooth is divided into five sections, the first of which begins at the beginning: Adam and Eve and the Fall, that is. It is the post-Edenic world that gives birth to desire, Dove suggests, and desire that indirectly brings about dancing, and dancing that is the momentary return to paradise. The poem "I have been a stranger in a strange land" describes the moment when Eve took the fruit as such:

And there was no voice in her head,
no whispered intelligence lurking
in the leaves-just an ache that grew
until she knew she'd already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm. (l. 22-27)

This then neatly segues into the poem Fox Trot Fridays:

Thank the stars there's a day
each week to tuck in

the grief, lift your pearls, and
stride brush stride

quick-quick with a
heel-ball-toe. Smooth

as Nat King Cole's
slow satin smile,

easy as taking
one day at a time:

one man and
one woman,

rib to rib,
with no heartbreak in sight-

just the sweep of Paradise
and the space of a song

to count all the wonders in it. ("Fox Trot Fridays")

Beyond the inevitable admiration of the sheer verve and deliciousness of Dove's language, one has to admire her cleverness, the way her themes interlock or, pun intended, dovetail. Throughout this first section, images of birds, dancing, and the well-documented departure from paradise all slip into one another. A man in wingtip shoes disturbs Venetian doves, his face obscured "by a dirty wingspan/ of the daily news" in the poem "Ta Ta Cha Cha." Her "Cozy Apologia" is an embrace of ordinary life written in heroic couplets, and the dancers in her poem "American Smooth" end up in a kind of momentary flight.

With Dove, one cannot ignore her historical or political scope either. The second section of this collection focuses on the experience of African-American soldiers in the First World War. The third section, "Twelve Jurors," are epigraphic poems that were engraved as part of an installation piece at the Sacramento Federal Court House. Even these sections are studded with music, or at least a certain musicality.

Still, almost as if anticipating that her readers will miss the richness of her opening poems, Dove follows with a two concluding selections of poems that are much more sensuous. Take her poem "Chocolate" in which the food in question is described as "velvet fruit" and "knotted smoke, dark punch/ of earth and night and leaf." Perhaps my favorite poem in the entire book, though, is "Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove," a gorgeous and poignant reimagining of this moment for the first African-American to win an Oscar, which ends with the following lines:

Is she or isn't she? Three million dishes,
a truckload of aprons and headrags later, and here
you are: poised, between husbands
and factions, no corset wide enough
to hold you in, your huge face a dark moon split
by that spontaneous smile-your trademark,
your curse. No matter, Hattie: It's a long, beautiful walk
into that flower-smothered standing ovation
so go on
and make them wait. (l. 41-50)

In my mind, this is Dove at her best-when her vivid language is combined with a storyteller's awareness of historical precedent, the vexed nature of the African-American experience one essential part of a messy Americanness. Dove's writing is gorgeous and uncomfortable, smooth and yet unflinching. In American Smooth, Dove has choreographed a breadth of poems into fluid collection that will not disappoint.