Contemporary Literary Criticism | Van Duyn, Mona (Vol. 116) - Harvey Shapiro (review date 22 September 1973)

Harvey Shapiro (review date 22 September 1973)

SOURCE: "As Three Poets See Reality," in The New York Times, Vol. 123, September 22, 1973, p. 22.

[In the following review, Shapiro provides a mixed review of Merciful Disguises.]

Mona Van Duyn's poems, crammed with reality, present a curious case. She has been much honored by the academy—a National Book Award and a Bollingen—but among the poets in New York she has few readers. That has to do with the nature of her reality: She writes as a wife, indeed as a housewife, putting up poems as another good woman might put up peaches (she can begin "An Essay on Criticism" with a description of making prepared onion soup). Her poems describe vacation trips to the mountains or the shore. She writes about female friends, children, relatives. All of this is patently unfashionable. Unfashionable also is the fact that her poems have subjects. More damning than that, there is the basic assumption in...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass