Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Van Duyn, Mona (Vol. 116) - Robert Hass (review date 5 September 1982)

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Robert Hass (review date 5 September 1982)

SOURCE: A review of Letters from a Father, and Other Poems, in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 12, No. 36, September 5, 1982, pp. 6-7.

[In the following review, Hass commends Letters from a Father, and Other Poems.]

Duyn was born in Iowa and lives in St. Louis. Her selected poems, Merciful Disguises, was published in 1973, and has been reissued in paperback this summer by Atheneum. Letters from a Father, and Other Poems is her first book since that gathering. How to convey the flavor of the title poem and the others about her elderly parents? A friend of mine, a pacifist, vegetarian ecologist, from Seattle who works for the Forest Service and lives on tofu, alfalfa sprouts, and the idea of wild rivers, married a woman from a Dutch farming family in Nebraska. Last summer he went back there to meet his in-laws. When he returned, he looked shellshocked. I asked him what had...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. John Woods (review date April 1960)
   2. W. D. Snodgrass (review date Spring 1960)
   3. David Kalstone (review date 2 August 1970)
   4. Arthur Oberg (review date Winter 1973)
   5. Harvey Shapiro (review date 22 September 1973)
   6. Lorrie Goldensohn (essay date March 1978)
   7. Robert Hass (review date 5 September 1982)
   8. M. L. Rosenthal (review date 13 March 1983)
   9. Richard Lattimore (review date Spring 1983)
   10. Alfred Corn (review date October 1990)
   11. Edward Hirsch (review date 18 November 1990)
   12. Constance Hunting (essay date 1991)
   13. Liz Rosenberg (review date 11 April 1993)
   14. Robyn Selman (review date 1 July 1993)
   15. Rachel Hadas (review date 18 July 1993)
   16. Ben Howard (review date December 1993)
   17. Judith Hall (essay date Winter 1994)
   18. Doris Earnshaw (review date Spring 1994)
   19. Doris Earnshaw (review date Spring 1994)
   20. Robert B. Shaw (review date Spring 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright