Masters of Transience
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" is the indispensable ingredient for "first-class bouillabaisse." "[W]hat gives comfort, what creates, but ugliness?" Inhaling the "stench" of "some boggy burning," she kneels at the "unpraised heart of being, of essence."
Firefall is Van Duyn's tenth collection of poems. In forms, themes, and tonal values it is of a piece with her earlier work, although more than half of the forty-four poems have been cast in what the poet calls the "minimalist sonnet," by which she means a sonnet with lines much shorter than pentameter. Playful or rueful, witty or grave, Van Duyn's sonnets, elegies, and detailed descriptive poems entertain subjects as diverse as love, marriage, births, deaths, art, the creative process, and the "full splendor" of "the flowering self." Apart from its minimalist experiments the present collection breaks no new ground, but like the poet's earlier work it bespeaks a humane, forgiving spirit, rich in warmth and moral wisdom.
Those qualities enliven Van Duyn's poems on love and marriage, which balance elements of passion and pragmatism, realism and romance. In "Eruption" she warns that "trapped love can't stop," that it "will swell to a mountain / till time blows its top / and it scalds everyone." But in "The Beginning," a minimalist sonnet, she looks with cool precision on passion and its changes:
The end
of passion
may refashion
a friend.
Eyes meet
in fear
of such dear
defeat.
The heart's core,
unbroken,
cringes.
The soul's door
swings open
on its hinges.
"For love to be real," the poet declares, "it must first be imaginary." But in a witty variation on a traditional motif, she envisions Cupid's good fortune in hitting a "mind" rather than a heart ("He had never known // so rich a rest, / an aim so blest"); and in a poem about dog-loving, she expresses her preference for an imperfect love, a "love that comes wearing … black and white polka dots." A poem about her marriage takes a similar stance, portraying the poet and her husband as "Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat in the Kitchen" and contrasting his "ration / of compulsive precisions" with her own approximations, her "searchings" and "revisions." On a more solemn note (in "The Marriage Sculptor"), she depicts a troubled marriage as a wrecked sculpture, which the artist will remake into something "more brilliant and powerful, // a larger work." "Beauty / learns from beauty,'" the sculptor explains, "'the first costly form // lies coiled in the last.'"
The rhythms of death and birth, destruction and construction, prevail in Firefall, lending shape to particular poems and balance to the collection as a whole. "Sondra" commemorates the early death of a "young scholar, young artist, / young lover of people." "Fallen Angel," a lyrical elegy, laments the loss of seven friends in a six-month period:
Not from rebellion does the angel fall.
The muscles of its pinions are huge from the stress
of storms that beat against its blessedness,
its migrations to need, whose distances are
deceitful.
Yet, in "For Julia Li Qiu," Van Duyn celebrates the birth of "a beautiful black-haired daughter," and in "Addendum to 'The Block,'" she welcomes the arrival of three babies in a single week, their advent announced by "pink or blue balloons and bold-faced signs."
Van Duyn brings a similar sense of balance to her reflections on art and the creative process. In an elegy for May Swenson she extols "the pride and peace of poems, their elegant play," and in a poem prompted by reading Richard Wilbur, she praises the "bodiless words" of poetry, its "perfect lightness" and "transparent form." Yet in the latter poem she acknowledges that no writer may "aspire" to "the sill where such poems tower," poets being frail and miserable creatures, whose messy lives resemble "paint pots," "open for using." And in "Endings," she contrasts the shapelessness and messiness of life with the closures and meaningful forms of art. "For what is story if not relief from the pain / of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless?"
Cast in rhymed pentameters, "Endings" represents the kind of poem at which Van Duyn excels—the relaxed colloquial monologue, in which a gift for thoughtful reflection and a love of quotidian realities find their fullest expression. At their best, her "minimalist sonnets" sparkle and sing, but their very economy seems at odds with the poet's penchant for gritty particulars and her proclivity for extended rumination. "Life and more life I want!" she declares in "Falls": "Not one crop / but thousands in their unimaginable / abundance, shape, size, color, kind…." To that end, as to her exploration of "the helpless sorrow / of being wise," her expansive reflections—mindful of heaven but grounded in flesh and soil—remain her trademark and her most enabling mode.
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