The best poetry of the early part of Dove's career is collected in Selected Poems, an anthology of works from The House on the Yellow Corner, Museum, and Thomas and Beulah, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for 1987. Selected Poems was published by Pantheon Books in 1993.

Dove is also a novelist. Her book Through the Ivory Gates, published by Vintage Books in 1993, tells the fictional tale of a young black artist, whose life is much like the author's, who returns to her home in Akron to run an artistsin- schools program.

W. S. Merwin's poem "The Horizons of Rooms" is similar to "Geometry" in the way that it contemplates the ways that humans surround themselves with logical constructs of their own making, forgetting about the independent world of nature that goes beyond human order. It is found in Merwin's 1988 collection...