(Gage Skidmore/W. W. Norton & Company)

As personal and public tragedies play out across the world, Rita Dove’s latest poetry collection, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” has arrived, arming readers with perspective and a voice for our time.

Even before I dove into the collection, I knew I admired Dove. She is one of us, a multiple sclerosis (MS) warrior, who has made little of her disease even as she battles it daily with medicines and exercise, attitude, and will.

Dove’s poem “Soup,” in the “Little Book of Woe” section, relates what she thought about after her neurologist gave her an MS diagnosis: “I have good news and bad news …” Her mind wandered, then landed on the process of making comforting, edifying soup to blunt the harshness of the notion that there was bad news to accept. “Yes, soup was what I wanted,” she wrote. “Not news / but the slow courage of the lentil / as it softened, its heart splitting into wings.” She writes about longing for the simplicity and easy navigability of a recipe that’s been made repeatedly — altered and improved with time and practice — not the uncharted territory of a disease that has no cure.

In fact, the relatability, vision, wisdom, and humor expressed throughout the collection captivate on every page. The poem “Family Reunion” talks about the mayhem of a gathering of children and adults, all bearing a slight resemblance. “Hordes of progeny are swirling / and my cousins yakking on as if they were waist-deep in quicksand,” Dove writes, conjuring memories of the noise and chaos of the ultimate superspreader event, the family reunion.

Dove must have written “Pedestrian Crossing: Charlottesville” on a frustrating day, trying to get to work while stymied by young University of Virginia students crossing the road, oblivious to traffic and courtesy: “Look how they dart / and dither, changing flanks as they lurch / along — golden gobbets of infuriating foolishness / or pure joy, depending on one’s disposition.” She forgives their silliness, however: “Unfair, / I know, my aggression — to lump them / into a gaggle (silly geese!) when all / they’re guilty of is being young. So far.”

But Dove’s reflections on our current times and the profound events of the past 50 years are the most bracing in the collection. She writes, “Believers slaughter their doubters / while the greedy oil their lips with excuses / and the righteous turn merciless; the merciful, mad.” Her poetic, lyrical assessments of the injustices and hypocrisies of the past are almost more poignant than any play-by-play prose we read online or in magazines today. They evoke emotion and confusion, rage and indignation.

As more of a prose reader, I’ve missed out on much of Dove’s work and awards, which include her recognition as former poet laureate of the United States with both a National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts — but her current book inspires me to look again, to research beyond my own oversight. Dove, currently the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and her poetry speak through a verbal filter of history, art, and even politics.

This book is a treasure of memory and music, a playlist for our time. At times cranky, always wise, often vulnerable, profoundly lyrical, and so damn smart, Dove has something to teach us without making us feel taught.