SOURCE: "Life Work," in Shenandoah, Vol. 44, Spring, 1994, pp. 38-48.

[In the following review of If It Be Not I, Near Changes, and Firefall, Shaw surveys Van Duyn's career, declaring: "At the height of her powers, Mona Van Duyn continues to give fresh meaning to the fusty term 'a life work.'"]

Among the many talents of Mona Van Duyn a gift for self-promotion is not conspicuous. She has served as Poet Laureate and won a Pulitzer Prize, and yet it seems only recently that her reputation has begun to catch up with her achievement. Her innate modesty has been one obvious reason for this, but there are other more capricious ones as well. For one thing, the long intervals between some of her books have made her an elusive figure to a public with a short attention span. Happily, the three volumes reviewed here [If It Be Not I: Collected Poems 1959–1982, Near Changes, and Firefall] offer a simple remedy by bringing all of her work at once into print. Beyond this, though, there remains the challenge of an audience's pet stereotypes, and it is here that Van Duyn's poems may even now make trouble for themselves by their refusal to flow into expected channels. She is an individualist both in her topics and her tone, always a good way to fend off easy celebrity.

Concerning topics: critics who are supple and acute in analyzing style can sound embarrassed, condescending, or simply at a loss when asked to consider content. I remember the nervous chuckles of some of my colleagues at Harvard in the '70's when Elizabeth Bishop proposed offering a course entitled "Subject Matter in Poetry." Poets are obliged to be practical in their thinking about this issue: they know they have to write about something, and the choice of material, for poets who are any good, is anything but random. It involves the discovery of subjects which will strike chords in the deep recesses of imagination as well as engaging the intellect's discursive powers. About such subjects the poet continually finds yet more to say, as Elizabeth Bishop did about travel and Marianne Moore did about animals. Gradually, by accretion and elaboration, it becomes clear that the fascination of such topics is not in themselves but in the underlying theme which emerges from the patterns and nuances of their repeated appearances. Any poem is "about" more than one thing, and its more vital meaning often is the less ostensible one.

Why can't readers remember this? Van Duyn's poems have in fact been sold short by those who have failed to see beyond their surfaces. Her "persona" in her writing seems to overlap largely with herself: an academic married to an academic, leading a comfortable upper-middle class life in Saint Louis. She has had the temerity to write poems about shopping, cooking, gardening, dogs, vacations. Practitioners of various brands of snobbery—social, political, intellectual—have shied away from subject matter presumed by them to have no depth. The dread word "domestic," once uttered, slams shut many reputedly tolerant minds. When W. H. Auden turned to deliberately mundane subjects in About the House and other later volumes, his willingness to venture into what were for him previously unexplored areas was viewed as a slackening of ambition. Richard Wilbur is another poet who has suffered from this kind of stock response. Like Auden, like Wilbur, Van Duyn in her best work demonstrates that any subject is as deep as the poet makes it.

Even if that were not so, it can be argued that domesticity has inherent if often unacknowledged profundities. It is, unsettlingly enough, what we all have in common, bohemian aspirations notwithstanding. Allen Ginsberg washes the dishes now and then, and for most of us such activities take up more time than we care to tabulate. Put domestic leisure together with domestic labor, and we have for our concern nothing less than what we often call daily life. It may seem at times less than stimulating, but it is not trivial, and one need not be an existentialist philosopher (or a novelist like Walker Percy) to apprehend rich possibilities mysteriously latent in everydayness. More than any other poet of her time Mona Van Duyn has made it her project to restore freshness to the familiar through close and caring attention to what most of us overlook.

She does this often with a welcome touch of civilized humor, but there is nothing apologetic in her tone, no self-consciousness like Cowper's mock-heroic "I sing the sofa." If we recall that Van Duyn's poems first appeared in quantity in the 1960's, we can see why her tone as well as her topics may have helped to marginalize her. Her writing must have seemed muted indeed compared with the piercing emotionalism of Sylvia Plath and other confessionalists, or the antiwar and subsequently anti-patriarchal anger of Adrienne Rich. It is not that Van Duyn never expresses negative feelings; rather, when she does so, she resists the starkness that results when such feelings are unreflectively allowed to dominate. Again, the parallel with Richard Wilbur is apt: until recently it was fairly common for critics to object that Wilbur didn't sound as if he had suffered enough. Having come to a historical juncture at which it is evident that there is more than enough suffering to go around, we may be readier than readers of the '60's were to appreciate poetry that can take the measure of grief and loss without being paralyzed by them, and can assign to ordinary goodness something closer to its true weight while pondering our experience on this planet.

How is it that Van Duyn establishes a scale of value in her poetry, showing the quotidian to be something other (and better) than the "malady" it was for Stevens? One of her strategies is to locate esthetic significance in unlikely contexts. In "Homework" she draws an emblem from preserving peaches:

     Lest the fair cheeks begin their shrivelling
     before a keeping eye has lit on their fairness,
     I pluck from the stony world some that can't cling
     to stone, for a homely, transparent form to bless.

So the poem begins, and it ends,

     Oh I know, I know that, great or humble, the arts
 
     in their helplessness can save but a few selves
     by such disguises from Time's hideous bite,
     and yet, a sweating Proust of the pantry shelves,
     I cupboard these pickled peaches in Time's despite.

A later poem, "Caring for Surfaces," flaunts political incorrectness by celebrating housecleaning:

     Dipped in detergent, dish and chandelier retrieve
     their glister, sopped, kitchen floor reflowers, knife
     rubbed with cork unrusts, colors of carpetweave
     cuffed with shampooer and vacuum with reblush
     ...

The end of the poem, without belaboring the point, makes a distinction between gender roles:

      Round rooms of surfaces I move, round board, books, bed.
      Men carve, dig, break, plunge as I smooth, shine, spread.

For all its tart matter-of-factness, the last remark merely brings the main point of the poem into keener focus. Van Duyn is less interested in putting men down than she is in celebrating the constructive and esthetic qualities of what have traditionally been seen as women's tasks. Such receptiveness to unexpected beauty suddenly perceived is frequent as well in her outdoor scenes, as at the end of "Postcards from Cape Split," a view of the blueberry barrens in Maine:

     Mile after mile, from road to the far mountains
     of furzy wasteland, flat. You almost miss it.
     Suddenly, under that empty space, you notice
     the curious color of the ground. Blue mile, blue mile,
     and then a little bent-over group of Indians
     creeping down string-marked aisles. Blue mile, blue mile,
     and then more Indians, pushing their forked dustpans.
     It looks like a race at some country picnic, but lost
     in that monstrous space, under that vacant sky.
 
     Why am I dazzled? It is only another harvest.
     The world blooms and we all bend and bring
     from ground and sea and mind its handsome harvests.

One notices the stress here is on the harvesters as much as on the harvest. However highly developed her esthetic sense is, it is not for Van Duyn the final arbiter of worth. Her outlook is more broadly humanistic; nature and art are not valued in and of themselves but for what they contribute to the common life of humanity. Human affection has proved to be her most enduring subject—the one more often than not beneath the surface of her domestic vignettes. In this regard she has attempted over the course of her career to fill some gaps. Literature offers us plenty of avowals of romantic passion, but not many good poems about marriage. Likewise, when one considers how important it is for maintaining civilization and keeping us sane, it is surprising how few good poems there are about friendship. Van Duyn has written fine poems about these relationships, as well as less intimate but still valuable ties of community.

"Toward a Definition of Marriage," "Pot-au-Feu," "Marriage, With Beasts," "Late Loving," and many other pieces offer searching glimpses into the mystery of an enduring marriage—"love's dishevelment," she calls it in one poem, "a duel of amateurs" in another. The image at the end of "Late Loving," typically intimate and unforced, plays on the paradox of familiarity which seemingly against all odds renews itself rather than growing stale:

     What you try to give me is more than I want to receive,
     yet each month when you pick up scissors for our appointment
     and my cut hair falls and covers your feet I believe
     that the house is filled again with the odor of ointment.

No sentimentalist, Van Duyn includes in her depictions of marriage traces of resistance, tension, volatility, as if in recognition of the part these play in keeping a relationship vital. Her views of friendship are equally persuasive and unplatitudinous. "Open Letter, Personal" is a wry and funny mock complaint: "Surely the jig is up. We've pinned each other down. / … And very soon / your smallest children will tire of naming my couch pillows, / black, white, green, lavender and brown." The arraignment, however, works its way to this spirited reversal:

    We know the quickest way to hurt each other, and
    we have used that knowledge. See, it is here, in
    the joined strands of our weaknesses, that we are
    netted together and heave together strongly like
    the great catch of mackerel that ends an Italian
    movie. I feel your bodies smell and shove and
    shine against me in the mess of the pitching boat.
                  My friends,
    we do not like each other any more. We love.

Other evocations of friendship include "The Gentle Snorer," "The Block," and elegies like "Sondra" and (an especially brilliant one) "The Creation." These, like the marriage pieces, emphasize the uncustomary nature of Van Duyn's stance. We are used to the Romantic notion inherited by Modernism of the poet as solitary, as the single contemplative figure in the landscape. Against this tendency Van Duyn affirms an insistent sociability. It sometimes seems that she uses her social world to define herself the way less gregarious poets use regional setting. Northern California, with little visible population, is the standard background for Robinson Jeffers; an equally underpopulated New England serves the purpose for Robert Frost. For Van Duyn it is not place but community that offers a milieu in which to situate herself. While the people concerned are most often those she knows well—her husband Jarvis Thurston and their circle of friends at Washington University—they may be in some cases totally anonymous, as in her praise of rest-room graffiti:

     Nothing is banal or lowly that tells us how well
     the world, whose highways proffer table and toilet
     as signs and occasions of comfort for belly and bowel,
     can comfort the heart too, somewhere in secret,
               … I bless
     all knowledge of love, all ways of publishing it.
 
           ("Open Letter from a Constant Reader")

Such lines reveal an imagination resolutely un-Manichean, and an outlook that is unhesitatingly humane. In one of her rather infrequent dramatic monologues she makes Lot's wife her heroine, vindicated by the human impulse that led her to challenge God's justice and look back at Sodom's destruction, for which she was turned to a pillar of salt:

     I was not easily shocked, but that punishment
     was blasphemous, impiety
     to the world as it is, things as they are.
     I turned to pure mourning, which ends the personal
     life, then quietly comes to its own end.
     Each time the clouds came and it rained,
     salt tears flowed from my whole being,
     and when that testimony was over
     grass began to grow on the plain.
 
                        ("The Cities of the Plain")

The poet's openness to human diversity and willingness to forgive weakness and folly make her occasional glances at evil all the more powerful. I do not expect to forget a poem from her most recent book, "'Have You Seen Me?'" subtitled "Lost Children Ads":

      My face in your mail
      is no longer me.
      Stranger, don't fail
      to look carefully,
 
      hear the hopeless, mild
      query each day,
      "Where is the child
      that was taken away?"
 
      Imperceptibly
      the world's being taught.
 
      No one can see
      what I saw or thought.
 
      Someone wants me
      to be where I'm not.

All this should corroborate Van Duyn's sincerity in speaking of "the only life worth living, the empathic life." Anyone who wishes to trace the record of a complex feeling developing and refining itself over a lifetime should consult the series of poems about her parents, spread over several books. Narrow, unimaginative, self-interested, the parents could have offered a different sort of poet—Lowell or Plath—much scope for destructive caricature. In Van Duyn's treatment they remain believable people with believable faults; they never metamorphose into those stylized monsters who abound in confessional literature. Van Duyn's poems about her father and mother are not designed principally to express grievance—though to some extent they do that—but more to register a painfully achieved understanding. They are instruments of reconciliation. In "Remedies, Maladies, Reasons" her dispassionate candor is breathtaking as she describes how her mother, a hypochondriac, kept her in valetudinarian bondage for much of her childhood:

     laying a fever-seeking hand on my forehead
     after school, incanting "Did your bowels move good?
 
     Wrap up before you go out and don't play hard.
     Are you sure you're not coming down with a cold? You
                      look tired,"
 
     keeping me numb on the couch for so many weeks,
     if somehow a wily cough, flu or pox
 
     got through her guard, my legs world shake and tingle,
     trying to find the blessed way back to school.

The chafe of confinement, the cause for resentment are vividly clear, and yet at the end of the poem the mother assumes an aspect in keeping with "a child's long-ago look," in which her obsessions are seen as rooted in love:

             Bending over me,
     giant, ferocious, she drives my Enemy,
     in steamy, hot-packed, camphorated nights,
     from every sickening place where he hides and waits.
 
     Do you think I don't know how love hallucinates?

Some related, equally impressive poems are "Letters from a Father," "Photographs" and "The Stream," an elegy for her mother which concludes with this extended metaphor:

     What is love? Truly I do not know.
 
     Sometimes, perhaps, instead of a great sea,
     it is a narrow stream running urgently
 
     far below ground, held down by rocky layers,
     the deeds of father and mother, helpless soothsayers
 
     of how our life is to be, weighted by clay,
     the dense pressure of thwarted needs, the replay
 
     of old misreadings; by hundreds of feet of soil,
     the gifts and wounds of the genes, the short or tall
 
     shape of our possibilities, seeking
     and seeking a way to the top, while above, running
 
     and stumbling this way and that on the clueless ground,
     another seeker clutches a dowsing-wand
 
     which bends, then lifts, dips, then straightens, everywhere,
     saying to the dowser, it is there, it is not there,
 
     and the untaught dowser believes, does not believe,
     and finally simply stands on the ground above,
 
     till a sliver of stream finds a crack and makes its way,
     slowly, too slowly, through rock and earth and clay.
 
     Here at my feet I see, after sixty years,
     the welling water—to which I add these tears.

As these lines indicate, Van Duyn is a master of what Frost called "the discreet handling of metaphor." Lengthy passages, and sometimes entire poems, are sustained comparisons like this one, almost like Metaphysical conceits although they are not so aggressively witty in manner. Van Duyn is equally adept in her use of rhyme, often employing both full and half rhyme in a single poem. This is a difficult thing to do successfully, but she more often than not brings it off—perhaps by virtue of the naturalness of her diction. In her two most recent books she has grown more venturesome as a craftsman, including a number of the short-lined poems she calls "minimalist sonnets." "'Have You Seen Me?'" quoted above, is an example. In these pieces, as in general, she has moved toward greater compactness. It might once have been possible to feel that some of her poems were longer than they needed to be; but this is rarely the case with her latest work.

She has also extended her range as a writer of personal narrative. The long poem "Falls" in her latest book begins casually enough as an account of sightseeing trips in her father's trailer during her childhood. But it shifts into a higher register in describing the falls of the title. There is first the firefall at Yosemite, a nighttime display in which a large bonfire was pushed off a cliff in a continuous stream of flame:

      … What was the fire? Although it fell
      from the soul's home and braided into its strands
      of hue and heat that cool, unearthly white,
      its glory poured from earth's burning body, red,
      yellow, blue, orange, twining, twisting
      to light, to stainless light.

And later there is Niagara:

    No waterfall, it seemed, but earth's bringing together
    of all its waters to make for that monstrous, open
    mouth (one lip one country, one another),
    out of a thousand long white quivering tongues
    one tongue that brought from the depths of throat appalling,
    thunderous boasts of its own fertility.

In the poem's dexterous mixture of narrative and meditation, both falls become symbols of poetic inspiration: the fire from the silent heaven, the water from the clamorous earth. Such elemental images, Van Duyn believes, leave impressions which last a lifetime:

     May one who comes upon a final book
     and hunts in husks for kernel hints of me
     find Niagara's roar still sacred to dim ears,
     firefall still blazing bright in memory.

Fortunately, there is no reason to suppose that Firefall is by any means "a final book." At the height of her powers, Mona Van Duyn continues to give fresh meaning to the fusty term "a life work." By conferring upon her own life the reverence of cleareyed attention, she has managed to enhance the life that all of us share.