When married couples came to my parents' home for card-playing afternoons, the husbands and wives parted at the front door like two rivers. The gulf between them seemed unnavigable—their card games were as different as their drinks, laughs, and speech levels. Women whose identities were usually defined by the consistency of their noodle puddings, were, until dinnertime, free. Literally: I remember my Aunt Ida rising up from the canasta table and, in an outrageous act of independence, lifting her dress and stripping off her girdle. My delight in Aunt Ida's act—her equivalent of a man rolling up his sleeves to deal the hand—has lasted over 20 years.

Women alone together can be wholly their own stories. Personas are lifted, girdles are shed, makeup isn't as thick. As a child, I found this kitchen-realism was infinitely more interesting than my father's universe of hollered business deals and Delta 88's. Though the women I knew in the suburbs were not educated in the traditional sense, their lives were full of accomplishment. One had been a Ziegfeld Girl, one ran a lingerie store in Grand Central, one bested the mob in a candy business, and one put her son through college on the change she collected from her husband's pockets and later invested. Though they remained powerless in the world, their intelligence was abundant and their knowledge could have filled reams.

Mona Van Duyn is their poet. Her lines are born out of that disappearing mid-century klatsch. Though her language and forms are flawless and her references ornately classical, the meanings of her poems translate readily into a universal suburbanese. It is the sound not of tongue in cheek, but of a woman biting the inside of her cheek to keep from bursting with what she knows. Van Duyn is the poet of the buzz beneath the fine, trimmed lawns; she's the poet of washing machines who writes superbly of being a woman in alt its disguises, of marriage and daughterhood and all their masks; she inhabits the mind behind the mind that stirs the soup.

Van Duyn has rolled up her sleeves for over 40 years in a suburb of St. Louis. There she is surrounded not by opulent homes or famous people, but by women and their children and their husbands.

She is a poet among the ordinary. And just as one could be fooled daily by the seemingly obedient women on my street, Van Duyn's poetry is meant to surprise you. Surprise is her métier, as in these lines from "Marriage, With Beasts": "Bringing our love to the zoo to see what species / it is, I carry my head under my arm, / you cradle yours; we will hold them up to cages / or set them back on perch at the proper moments … / for what happens here is as informal / as disease, and we, like lust, are serious / about making sense of a strange, entire surface." Scanning this nugget, my eyes are drawn to the words cages, cradle, and perch, all apt synonyms for suburbs or zoos. The major trope of Van Duyn's work is the recurring plainness she presents again and again, so often that it becomes elaborate and larger than life. The seemingly ordinary women of St. Louis are mistresses of surface, adept at obedience, childlike innocence, and complicity, but in Van Duyn's poems they are brilliantly secretive. They hide their intelligence under cosmetic touches of seductiveness and eccentrism, elusive and elaborate disguises. When I read Van Duyn's poetry I experience the same exhilaration I found as a child watching Aunt Ida strip off her girdle—the joy of uncovering the skin beneath the painted, glossy foundation:

        I have given you paper faces
        and they have grown lifelike,
      and you have stuck on my lips in
        this sheep's smile.
      If I could get free of you I would
        change, and I would choke
      this stooge to death and be proud
        and violent for a while.
      As long as the moon hides half her
        face we are friends of the moon.
      As long as sight reaches through
        space we are fond of the stars.
      But there is no space and what
        light is yours and what is mine
      is impossible to tell in this
        monstrous Palomar
      where each pock is plain.

Looking at Van Duyn's collected poems, If It Be Not I, which includes selections from each of her out-of-print books from 1959 to 1982, I am struck by the fact that some of her best work remains poems such as "Leda Reconsidered," revisions of women's roles in classical myths—myths she upends. What Anne Sexton did for fairy-tale femmes Cinderella and Gretel, Van Duyn does for Leda and Danae. The poems included here from her third volume, To See To Take, concentrate on the ordinary housewife's encounters with Zeus, who is not only king of the gods, but king of the hearth. In this cycle of poems, the domestic muse achieves her true station. Here are Zeus, Leda, Danae, and Eros gossiping over the back fence with Van Duyn's St. Louis kitchen goddess, the newly imagined Leda.

Van Duyn's "Leda" takes off with an epigraph from Yeats's "Leda and the Swan": "Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?" Yeats answers yes, Van Duyn definitely no: "Not even for a moment. He knew for one thing, what he was. / When he saw the swan in her eyes he could let her drop. / In the first look of love men find their great disguise, / and collecting these rare pictures of himself was his life." By examining layer after layer of the god's mask, Leda is able to see both the god and herself more clearly. Dropped by the god, she awakens a suburban housewife:

       Later, with the children in
       school, she opened her eyes
    and saw her own openness, and
       felt relief.
    In men's stories her life ended
       with his loss.
    She stiffened under the storm of
       his wings to a glassy shape,
    stricken and mysterious and
       immortal. But the fact is,
    she was not, for such an ending,
       abstract enough.
    She tried for a while to
       understand what it was
    that had happened, and then
       decided to let it drop.
    She married a smaller man with a
       beaky nose,
    and melted away in the storm of
       everyday life.

With "Leda Reconsidered," Van Duyn juxtaposes gods and humans, great expectations and limited resources. Aprons, laundry, flaws, and all, the courageous lowlife of humans wins. Her Leda puts on a power that Yeats's Leda did not consider: In the companion poem, "Outlandish Agon," she asks, "And now, how much would she try / to see, to take, / of what was not hers, of what / was not to be offered?"

Very little in the way of understanding or shared knowledge and power was offered to Van Duyn by critics of her early poetry. In 1965, shortly after the appearance of Van Duyn's second book, A Time of Bees, James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Mona Van Duyn is one of the best woman poets around. She is all woman, dealing very largely with the day-to-day domestic scene, both overemphasized in current poetry and yet hardly touched in depth at all." Believe it or not, this quick study, in which Dickey proposes that men write about what is significant (wars, travels, philosophic themes of great importance, god), while women are condemned to write about their own little lives, was seen as a rave—good enough to be used on Van Duyn's dust jacket. But to my mind, Van Duyn long ago took Dickey's comment and ran with it, becoming a full-blown domestic goddess. Those accustomed to a more literary language might prefer her own description of herself from the poem "Homework": "a sweating Proust of the pantry shelves." Still, a rose is a rose, and no matter how you say it, Van Duyn is one of the pioneers of a poetry that gives voice to the inner life of suburban women. Though what that inner life comprises is precisely what has eluded so many of her (male) readers. The delicious irony is that Van Duyn now has James Dickey's old job as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Even her loyal women readers may have something of a difficult time with Van Duyn. In numerous interviews over the years she has kept a distance, refusing to define herself as a feminist, which may have reduced her popularity among my contemporaries. To this day, she calls herself Mrs. Jarvis Thurston in author bios. "People blush for me in political discussion," she writes in "Elementary Attitudes," and she's right. Maybe she loves her disguises too well. Just as Marilyn Monroe's naïveté seemed natural rather than performed, Van Duyn's disguises are too good; they disguise the disguises. To take Van Duyn at her word, accept her simply as the sweating Proust of the pantry shelves, is to miss the point of her work. The mask of the suburban woman enables her to explore perfection, reality, and the mediation between the two. An apron-wearing Daniel, she gains access to the master's den. One of the best woman poets, indeed.

The poems in Letters from a Father and Near Changes and now Fire/all, her latest work, depart from the use of myth and disguises and move into more open, contemporary-sounding discussions of aging: her parents' illness, her 50-year marriage. To these she brings linguistic density and ease with form, wresting poems out of what is given to her—whether it's time's effects on the lover's body or actual letters from her father—and creating humorous, instructive, empathic work. Like Eavan Boland's poems about her Irish home front, Van Duyn's poems contain the intelligence of the besieged, but these women toss the unfamiliarity of the familiar instead of Molotov cocktails. Which makes Van Duyn's poems political acts (whether she sees them that way or not).

Firefall contains some especially delightful shorter pieces. But overall, its strength lies in the way that the new poems reinforce themes already familiar to readers of her work; it will also do well as an introduction of Van Duyn to new readers. The opening poem, "A Dog Lover's Confession," an ars poetica in the form of a semisonnet, brings us back to Van Duyn's omnipresent concern, that place between the ideal and the realized, which is nothing more or less than the suburb of life's great mysteries where we all live and work, amid the pocks.

       Perfect love I have known,
     whose animal eyes
     disregard all disguise,
     go beyond flesh and bone,
 
     and unshaken forever,
     heart's white purity
     any angel would envy.
     But I slightly prefer
 
     unpredictable pairing,
     pain and peace in one thing,
     unplumbable thoughts,
     the love that comes wearing,
     fall, fire, freeze or spring.
     black and white polka dots.