Van Duyn, Mona (Vol. 116) - David Kalstone (review date 2 August 1970)
David Kalstone (review date 2 August 1970)
SOURCE: "Charms to Stave Off the Executioner," in New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1970, pp. 5, 22.
[In the following review, Kalstone offers a positive view of To See, To Take.]
To See, To Take, Mona Van Duyn's title, like our first verbs, sounds innocent at the outset, fierce and telling later on. Infinitives in certain languages are imperatives as well; and so they are here, in poems where seeing and taking are urgent as well as pleasurable activities:
And now, how much would she try
to see, to take,
of what was not hers, of what
was not going to be offered?
The subject of these lines is "Leda Reconsidered," the lady trying, in a reflective moment before the swangod takes her, to escape the fate of an earlier Leda in this same book who "married a smaller man with a beaky nose, / and melted away in...
[The entire page is 925 words long]
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