Contemporary Literary Criticism | Van Duyn, Mona (Vol. 116) - Ben Howard (review date December 1993)

Ben Howard (review date December 1993)

SOURCE: "Masters of Transience," in Poetry, Vol. CLXIII, No. 3, December, 1993, pp. 158-70.

[In the following review, Howard offers praise for Firefall.]

Over the course of her long career Mona Van Duyn has maintained two quite different allegiances. A celebrant of the world as well as the spirit, she has trafficked freely between privileged moments and domestic routines, the glories of changeless art and the pile of soiled laundry. "Forever the spirit wants to be embodied," she reminds us; but for Van Duyn the spirit's embodiments are, as often as not, ungainly and unseemly—the "spraddled fern of celery top," the "bloodclot of an over-ripe tomato." Likewise the sources of art, which give rise to beauty and pleasure, are themselves unpleasant and unbeautiful. "What fertilizes but muck?" she asks in "Rascasse," a hymn of praise for the hogfish, "the ugliest fish in the world," whose prized "essence"...

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