[In the review below, Earnshaw provides a laudatory review of Firefall.]

Some of the "minimalist" sonnets are intended to comment on the host poem with an interrogation or analysis. Some are "translations" into a more concise language. In commenting on these famous poems, Van Duyn is sure-footed, and the poems take on the pungent flavor of medieval Provencal or Old French forms. Two poems of Yeats are "translated": "The Circus Animals' Desertion" and "A Prayer for My Daughter." The first restates the poem's thought in a straightforward manner, but the second extends the meaning metaphorically into another dimension not necessarily in the original, more a "comment" than a "translation." The exercise of matching the derived poem to the original exhilarates the mind. Van Duyn brings to the canon in English a game many would enjoy. The "comment" on Frost's "Mending Wall" poem, for example, takes eighteen lines from the forty-five-line original. Students from junior high school to university graduate seminars would be intrigued.

Many readers enjoy Van Duyn's lighthearted poems, such as, in this collection, "Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat in the Kitchen" or "We Are in Your Area" or "Words for the Dumb," about styles of cooking, suburban annoyances, and the love of pets. "Addendum to 'The Block'" continues the poem from Near Changes that encapsulates decades of suburban living. More serious are the poems on art—"Chagall's 'Les Plumes en Fleur'"—and the death of loved ones: "For May Swenson" and "Sondra." Her devotion to birds, known from other poems, surfaces in "Poets in Late Winter." Reimaginings of Shakespeare's Tempest appear in two poems, "Miranda Grows Up" and "Another Tempest." In the first she feels Miranda's need to forgive Prospero for taking her from the island to a northern climate where the cold would chill her innocence. The second, more extreme, keeps everyone on the island, gives Fernando the line "Oh brave new world," and reveals Miranda, "the greedy daughter," as Caliban. An essay on this transformation, and on the myth of Leda (another obsessive topic with Van Duyn), would be most interesting.

The final poem, "The Delivery," reaches a level of profound self-revelation. Its two parts demonstrate in one poem two modes of Van Duyn's poetry: realistic narrative and rich metaphor, the "merciful disguise." The opening narrative shows a childhood scene of domestic trauma: the girl's mother ridicules her daughter for feeling intensely a girlfriend's disgrace, saying "I wasn't scolding you. I was scolding Betty." The whole family picks up the joke and laughs as the daughter feels the birth of her "self" apart from the family. In the second part, this self, now carried underwater to "the mourning sea," meets the sinking people "(even Mother and Father)," whom she cannot rescue. She can go part way under into the "Omnipotent dark" that has seized them, but she cannot save them. She returns upward to the lighter water and then to the air. We feel the sadness that accompanies the experience of loneliness that follows illumination. The world "has too much roughage in it," she has said in another poem, but we feel in her poetry the joy of the lighted water and the air.