From Library Journal
Van Duyn, poet laureate of the United States, is perhaps the most beloved American poet writing today. Her new work, Firefall , comes closely on the heels of Near Changes ( LJ 3/15/90), for which she won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize. Here are more of the occasional poems and "minimalist" sonnets that showcase her deep-cutting wit: "Duke, there are deserts with fountains where lovers tarry/ and those who die of thirst at the fountain-side,/ since for love to be real it must first be imaginary." But there are also longer poems like "Falls," about growing up in the repressed rural Midwest. Witnessing the "firefall"--a nightly Yosemite tourist attraction where embers were poured from a cliff--the speaker awakens to "her own heart's life" as a writer; seeing Niagara Falls for the first time, she anticipates a parallel sexual awakening: "Wild for the blind, helpless confinement to send me/ over the lip in a will-less fall, thrown/ from my safe observant stand, tossed, rammed,/ broken, drowned perhaps--but love alone . . ./ could build no barrel." Many of these poems talk about death, illness, and the loss of dear ones. Yet irony and humor are implicit in Van Duyn's sense that even final endings have afterwards. And here is a poet who, upon wondering if she has entered territory obscure to the reader, kindly provides notes. Van Duyn's work has been collected before. Her new collection, If It Be Not I , includes all previously published works except, unfortunately, Near Changes . Her two new volumes are very highly recommended.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New YorkCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From the Inside Flap
Mana Van Duyn's most recent collection is splendidly varied: witty, moving, sometimes astonishing. As Howard Nemerov said of her last book, "It is not only that the best of her poems teaches us so much about life, but that life, over a long time, teaches us the truth about these poems."
From the brief poems she calls "minimalist sonnets" to the powerful long poems "Falls" and "Delivery," both recalling incidents from childhood and youth, the work in this extraordinary book is that of a poet reaching the depths and heights of her own talent.
A companion to this one,
If It Be Not I: Collected Poems 1959-1982, restores to print in one substantial book all of her work from
Merciful Disguises and
Letters from a Father.
