Selected Poems of Mona Van Duyn
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This generous selection of Mona Van Duyn’s distinguished, award-winning work spans four decades. Beginning with her classic Valentines to the Wide World (1959), encompassing the intimate voice of Bedtime Stories (1972) and the moving Letters from a Father (1982), crowned by the life-spanning Firefall (1993), Selected Poems reacquaints us with a poet whose ear is keenly tuned to the music of nature and human conversation. In lively and varied forms, from her minimalist sonnets to her magisterial longer pieces, Van Duyn captures a multiplicity of worlds within her world, in a tone inflected by both Midwestern pragmatism and a deep metaphysical intelligence. As she contemplates the act of reading in bed, a Rhenish sculpture in the Cloisters, or the loss of her mother, the poet goes beyond context to discover consciousness: an expression of the larger ideas and emotions—finally, the art—in the smallest details of our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Born in Iowa and a longtime St. Louis resident, Van Duyn will be 81 years old this year; over the course of her career she has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Prize, and she has served as U.S. Poet Laureate. Her If It Be Not I: Collected Poems 1959 1982 compiles her acutely emotional poems about deceptively ordinary domestic experiences. This book offers fewer poems from each volume than that collection, but includes selections from books published in 1990 and 1993. In poems like "Letters from a Father," "Photographs" and "The Stream," Van Duyn addresses at aching length the problems of being an aging daughter of two aging and ornery parents: "I see your loving look wherever I go./ What is love? Truly I do not know./ Sometimes, perhaps, instead of a great sea,/ it is a narrow stream running urgently/ ...Here at my feet I see, after sixty years,/ the welling water to which I add these tears." Unlike her exact contemporary (and Knopf list-mate) Marie Ponsot, Van Duyn does not write metaphysical poems her use of direct exposition gives a bluff and hearty humor to verse like "The Vision Test." When the poet renews her driver's license and tells the clerk that her profession is "poet," "Her pencil's still. She turns away from me/ to the waiting crowd, tips back her head like a hen/ drinking clotted milk, and her 'Ha ha hee hee hee'/ of hysterical laughter rings through the room. Again/ 'Oh, ha ha ha ha hee hee hee.'" Readers will find such wry self-positions throughout this collection, and will come to understand what all the fuss has been about.
