Van Duyn, Mona (Vol. 116) - Alfred Corn (review date October 1990)
Alfred Corn (review date October 1990)
SOURCE: A review of Near Changes, in Poetry, Vol. CLVII, No. 1, October, 1990, pp. 47-50.
[In the following review, Corn offers a possitive assesment of Near Changes.]
You can't doubt she means it when, in a poem called "Glad Heart at the Supermarket," Mona Van Duyn says, "Dear friends, dear aging hearts that are stressed by young / surges and shocks of feeling, dear minds aquiver, / their stiffening vessels bulged with the rush of fresh / insights, jokes, dreams, may you live forever!" There is in this book a generous sense of community, the recognition that friendship is one of the principal lights along the path, especially toward the end. The sense of pathos is all the more piercing, then, in poems like the elegy mentioned earlier, "For David Kalstone," and the villanelle "Condemned Site," a lament for the death of five friends, one of its repeated lines, "In Love's old boardinghouse, the...
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