Mona Van Duyn 1st edit/1 print Selected Poems First Edition 2002 [Hardcover] Van Duyn, Mona [Hardcover] Van Duyn, Mona

by Mona van Duyn

extremely rare,very good condition

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Mona Jane van Duyn was an American poet. She was appointed poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1992.

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I no longer recall where I first came across Mona Van Duyn's poetry but I was immediately taken and have been eyeing this Selected Poems for years. I have not been disappointed. There's only one brief section that's out of tune with the rest. The majority of the book is so enjoyable that I stopped doing my usual marking of favorites because they all were worth re-reading. Even before I was finished with it, I began looking for other work of hers and discovered that she won the Pulitzer in 1990 for her book Near Changes.

Van Duyn enjoys form, especially rhyme, but she isn't at all slavish to it. Part of the fun of her work is her off-off-rhymes. Sometimes they aren't really rhymes at all but words with sounds similarities that vary: brown, grin; brush, backwash. Is there a term for "rhymes" that rely on the final consonant sound? And for perfect rhyme, she gives us "pollute us, arbutus."

Van Duyn's poems most often begin as observations of everyday life. Sometimes they become a meditation and sometimes they remain an observation but enlivened with original language. I never read far without running into a sense of humor about herself and life.

In a search for poems on the internet to copy here as examples, I discovered that the Poetry Foundation has so many poems of hers available that it's virtually a selected volume itself: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/m...

Because of the number of people here with an interest in medical poetry, I'm going to post the rather long "Death by Aesthetics." It's one of her earlier poems.

Here is the doctor, an abstracted lover,
dressed as a virgin, coming to keep the tryst.
The patient was early; she is lovely; but yet
she is sick, his instruments will agree on this.

Is this the place, she wonders, and is he the one?
Yes, love is the healer, he will strip her bare,
and all his machinery of definition
tells her experience is costly here,

so she is reassured. The doctor approaches
and bends to her heart. But she sees him sprout like a tree
with metallic twigs on his fingers and blooms of chrome
at his eye and ear for the sterile ceremony.

Oh tight and tighter his rubber squeeze of her arm.
'Ahhh' she sighs at a chilly touch on her tongue.
Up the tubes her breath comes crying, as over her,
back and breast, he moves his silver thumb.

His fluoroscope hugs her. Soft the intemperate girl,
disordered. Willing she lies while he unfolds
her disease, but a stem of glass protects his fingertips
from her heat, nor will he catch her cold.

He peels her. Under the swaddling epiderm
her body is the same blue bush. Beautiful canals
course like a postcard scene that's sent him often.
He counts the tiptup, tiptup of her dutiful valves.

Pain hides like a sinner in her mesh of nerves.
But her symptoms constellate! Quickly he warms
to his consummation, while her fever flares
in its wick of vein, her wicked blood burns.

He hands her a paper. 'Goodbye. Live quietly,
make some new friends. I've seen these stubborn cases
cured with time. My bill will arrive. Dear lady,
it's been a most enjoyable diagnosis.'

She clings, but her fingers slip on his starchy dress.
'Don't leave me! Learn me! If this is all, you've swindled
my whole booty of meaning, where is my dearness?
Pore against pore, the delicate hairs commingled,

with cells and ligaments, tissue lapped on bone,
meet me, feel the way my body feels,
and in my bounty of dews, fluxes and seasons,
orifices, in my wastes and smells

see self. Self in the secret stones I chafed
to shape in my bladder. Out of a dream I fished
the ache that feeds in my stomach's weedy slough.
This tender swelling's the bud of my frosted wish.

Search out my mind's embroidery of scars.
My ichor runs to death so speedily,
spit up your text and taste my living texture.
Sweat to hunt me with love, and burn with me.'

But he is gone. 'Don't touch me' was all he answered.
'Separateness,' says the paper. The world, we beg,
will keep her though she's caught its throbbing senses,
its bugs still swim in her breath, she's bright with its plague.

There are other medical poems in her earlier work, apparently because her mother had a fear of her falling ill and was convinced of her frailty. And she did seem to have an unnamed malady at some point outside of her childhood. There are other poems that explore the relationships with her parents, especially as they aged. One I found particularly moving was about sorting through photographs with her them and finding that they wanted to save nothing.

As I search to quote another, I just can't decide. The humorous, clever and meaningful one about the excessively religious aunt (see "A Relative and an Absolute": http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-rela...). "The Gentle Snorer"? at the link above? "A Kind of Music" (also at the link above) wherein she writes a poem about a puppy in which 12 of the 15 lines end in a long e sound? There are many that have charms so I'm just going to recommend that you visit her collection at the Poetry Foundation and see if you enjoy them.

As I said, there was one false note, a section called "Bedtime Stories." I believe that's the name of the book they came from. It's a series of stories of personal and family history told to her by her grandmother, expressed in her grandmother's ungrammatical, mispronounced English. It's one of those situations where I don't see why they're poems. They strike me as prose vignettes and very much family memories that haven't been crafted into anything more than that.

Otherwise, it's hard to go wrong with her poetry. She also wrote "minimalist sonnets" (her phrase) in her later years. I'll end with an appropriate one of those titled "Closures":

Line fourteen
closes
to serene
supposes.
A sparkling
soda
toasts the darkling
coda.

Life's canvas
only
would revoke

the lustrous,
lonely,
last stroke.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This selection includes poems from Valentines to the Wide World, A Time of Bees, To See, To Take, Bedtime Stories, New Poems from Merciful Disguises, Letters from a Father, and Other Poems, Near Changes, Firefall...

From Valentines to the Wide World 1959...

Over the gray, massed blunder of her face
light hung crudely and apologetic sight
crossed in a hurry. Asking very little,
her eyes were patiently placed there.
Dress loved nothing and wandered away
wherever possible, needing its own character.

Used to the stories, we wise children
made pleasant pictures of her when alive, till
someone who knew told us it was never so.

Next, wisely waited to see the hidden dancer,
the expected flare leaping through that fog
of flesh, but no one ever did.
In a last wisdom, conceived of a moment
love lit her like a star and the star burned out.
Interested friends said this has never happened.

- Woman Waiting, pg. 8

From A Time of Bees 1964...

I
Every evening
in this old valley
a bird, a little bird,
says thanks
like a sleepy hen
for red
berries.

II
The farmer sits in the sun
and sends nine kids out to work in all directions
The baby sits on his lap, the toddler leans on his knee.
We have to buy some fishing worms, les vers.
"Vingt-cinq vers, s'il vous plaît."
A tow-head boy runs for the can of worms. "Fait chaud aujourd'hui."
How pleasant it is.
The sun shines on the thin farm.
The lazy farmer beams at his busy children.
We make the dog howl for the baby.
Ecoute," the farmer tells his child,
"il parle.
Ecoute,
il parle."

III
The dog changes
here in the open, in wild country.
He wanders with chipmunks,
he saw a moose,
birds beset him,
the skunks under the cabin makes his hair go up.
He spreads his toes to walk the dock
over gaps in the boards
and looks at the lake with calculation.
He is another animal.

IV
I am afraid to swim in this water,
it is so thick with life.
One stranger after another
comes out of it. Right by the boat
there rose at dusk the otter,
dark and slick, as if covered with ointment.
I said, "My God, an alligator!"
And the pike comes up, his vacant golden eye
staring away from the hook.
Perhaps there are eels down under,
looking up at the skating bugs.
In Quebec there is no alligator,
but I see many a stranger.

V
The rocky beaches
are covered with blueberries.
I thought they were blue flowers at first.
Now we use them in pie and pancake,
but still they look like flowers.
Hazy blue,
their smoke rubs off with one touch of the finger.
Under the smear
a deeper blue appears,
as rich and dark as anything we earn.
And so this country feeds our hungers.

VI
The loon is yodeling.
My favourite waterfowl, sleek and swarthy,
a master duck,
he will swim under half the lake
before he comes up with his catch, flapping and swallowing.
But strong as he is, brave as he is,
he is lonesome bird.
He and his mate must touch each other
all day long across the water
with their cries:
"Here. Here I am. And you? You?"
"Yes, I am here. And you? You? You? You? You?"

- Quebec Suite, for Robert Wykes, Composer, pg. 35-37

From To See, To Take 1970...

The legal children of a literary man
remember his ugly words to their mother.
He made them keep quiet and kissed them later.
He made them stop fighting and finish their supper.
His stink in the bathroom sickened their noses.
He left them with sitters in lonesome houses.
He mounted their mother and made them wear braces.
He fattened on fame and raised them thin.

But the secret sons of the same man
spring up like weeds from the seed of his word.
They eat from his hand and it is not hard.
They unravel his sweater and swing from his beard.
They smell in their sleep his ferns and roses.
They hunt the fox on his giant horses.
They slap their mother, repeating his phrases,
and swell in his sight and suck him thin.

- Relationships, pg. 86

From Bedtime Stories 1972...

So early into a big bed stowed out of sight,
chlid that I was, wide awake from the day, the day
of chiding and loneliness, unspent energy
in muscles and bone ("growing pains"), the day's light
still promising from the window, would toss and yell,
"Grandma, Grandpa! Please come and sit by me.
Tell me a story! Tell me another story!"
All that was missed, radio, books, preschool,
hours of TV, music, long good-nights said,
the thrilling, calling, right-after-supper play
of the other kids in their far-off pom-pom-pullaway,
would come in the voice of an old woman by the bed.

- Bedtime Stories, pg. 95

From New Poems from Merciful Disguises 1973...

One person present steps on his pedal of speech
and, like a faulty drinking foundation, it spurts
all over the room in facts and puns and jokes,
on books, on people, on politics, on sports,

on everything. Two or three others, gathered
to chat, must bear his unending monologue
between their impatient heads like a giant buzz
of a giant fly, or magnanimous bullfrog

croaking for all the frogs in the world. Amid
the screech of traffic or in a hubbub crowd
he climbs the decibels toward some glorious view.
I think he only loves himself out loud.

- The Talker, pg. 117

From Letters from a Father, and Other Poems 1982...

They had the Boston Bull before I was born,
and Mother liked her far more than she liked me.
We both had a trick. When Mother shaved one forefinger
with the other and said, "Shame, sha-a-me!" Peewee
would growl and snap most amusingly right on cue.
I, when shamed in the same manner, would cry.
I see my error now, but what good does it do?

- Growing Up Askew, pg. 137

From Near Changes 1990...

From a new peony,
my last anthem,
a squirrel in glee
broke the budded stem.
I thought, Where is joy
without fresh bloom,
that old hearts' ploy
to mask the tomb?

Then a volunteer
stalk sprung from sour
bird-drop this year
burst in frantic flower.

The world's perverse,
but it could be worse.

- Sonnet for Minimalist, pg. 185

From Firefall 1993...

Within
the stout
a thin
wants out,

bu ta chlid
in the gray's
reconciled,
wants to stay,

so happy
to bicker
and win,

to be
in that thicker
skin.

- Insiders, pg. 207

[John Cain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa and grew up in my hometown, Eldora, Iowa. She won many awards but I must confess I had not read any of her poems until recently. Why, I am not sure. She is a fine poet with a distinctly midwestern voice. It almost seemed like I was listening to a person I may known ll my life. James Wright and B.H Fairchild are often said to have authentic Midwestern voices. Hers is more true the sound and rhythms of speech that I am familiar with. Is that a good thing? In someways yes very much so it is so difficult to sound normal and not be boring, flat and unoriginal on the page. She is a poet not to be overlooked if you want to know about American poets.

[scarlettraces · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another random poetry purchase that turned out pretty good.