Thomas and Beulah: poems

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Thomas and Beulah is a book of poetry by the American poet Rita Dove which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987^[1]. It was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

This book tells the story of an African-American family through a series of poems. Specifically, these are stories of Rita Dove's grandparents. Readers experience the World War II era and the Great Depression in sequential year order. The book is broken into two sections. Section One: Mandolin, and Section Two: Canary in Bloom. The books ends with a chronology of Thomas and Beulah's lives. The chronology traces them from 1900, when Thomas is born, to 1969, when Beulah dies. The inscription from the author reads "for my mother, Elvira Elizabeth".