Contemporary Literary Criticism | Van Duyn, Mona (Vol. 116) - Rachel Hadas (review date 18 July 1993)

Rachel Hadas (review date 18 July 1993)

SOURCE: "Serious Poets," in New York Times Book Review, Vol. 98, July 18, 1993, p. 18.

[In the following excerpt, Hadas reviews If It Be Not I and Firefall, and surveys Van Duyn's career.]

Mona Van Duyn is a Midwesterner, and her poetry speaks expansively; her lines are loaded like a cornucopia with the things of this world. A wonderful early poem, "Three Valentines to the Wide World" (1959) posits a distrust of unwieldy generalities: I have never enjoyed those roadside overlooks from which you can see the mountains of two states. The view keeps generating a kind of pure, meaningless exaltation that I can't find a use for … a statement so abstract that it's tiresome.

Simply to see and say is never enough. However rich, Ms. Van Duyn's voice is never bland; particularity inflects her love of the world. Firefall, her new collection, varies the pace of the work with skinny...

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