Near Changes - Hardcover

Van Duyn, Mona

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394584449 ISBN 13: 9780394584447

Publisher: Knopf, 1990

Synopsis

Mona Van Duyn's Near Changes is a valuable addition to contemporary American poetry. This work provides a variety of riches surpassing even that of her earlier work. For wit, inventiveness, true feeling and a sharp eye for the passing scene, there is no one better than she.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author

Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921, and since 1950 has lived in St. Louis, Missouri. She has taught widely in the United States and abroad, most recently at Washington University.  She is the author of nine books of poems: Firefall (1994); If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982 (1994); Near Changes (1990), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Letters From a Father, and Other Poems (1982); Merciful Disguises (1973, reissued 1982); Bedtime Stories (1972); To See, To Take (1970), which received the National Book Award; A Time of Bees (1964); and Valentines to the Wide World (1959). With her husband, Jarvis Thurston, she founded Perspective, a Quarterly of Literature in 1947, and co-edited it until 1970. She has been awarded the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize and the Eunice Tietjens Award from Poetry, and the Shelley Memorial Prize, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the NationalEndowment for the Arts. She has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

n's Near Changes is a valuable addition to contemporary American poetry. This work provides a variety of riches surpassing even that of her earlier work. For wit, inventiveness, true feeling and a sharp eye for the passing scene, there is no one better than she.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Reviews

These poems, the author's first collection in eight years, are quiet, contemplative, and reflective in a refreshingly straightforward way. Although occasionally overly sentimental, they speak to the value of everyday life and experience in a way that we can all understand. The author encompasses a wide sweep of subject--from the deep love that develops between two people who have been together for many years to the dailiness of a supermarket trip. And, while some of the poems express an almost mournful sense of regret over the things in life that didn't turn out as planned, the overall tone is of affirmation and optimism.
- Jessica Grim, Univ. of California Lib., Berkeley
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Gardens" (for Anthony Hecht)

I

Someone once described the Japanese garden
as "trivialities arranged to look
significant." So might we label one kind
of poem, whose dry hint of a river or brook,
raked free of detritus, briefly flows, turns
into terraces (abstraction of waterfall)
and comes to its end in a large, strict rectangle
of the same white sand (the sea, the All
or Nothingness), whose stone showing its white
above the moss that wraps its lower part
can be read as a high mountain, forested
and snowcapped, in this metaphoric art.
Guided by its setting in white space
proportionally vast, the making mind
of the beholder, which walks hand in hand
with the austere creator, fast will find
one dwarf pine's looming. Shading, importance, meaning
tower from the green suggestion. Delicacy
molds throughout a narrow path between Nature's
carelessness and the lifeless rigidity
of perfect order. A world is here that returns
to pure idea when we look away,
its grasp on our hearts being as miniature
as the memory of one faultless, serene day.

II

But there is another kind of garden, another
poetry (might we say?) whose "mimicry
of endlessness" calls upon every muscle
of self, while the senses are whelmed toward idolatry.
To enter its rich acreage is to know
that much must be left for another day, or year
or season. Though Flora stands in stone, her kingdoms
of brilliant imagery cloud over or clear--
rosebeds, meadows of daffodil, rainbow
borders, wild blooms under treeshade--as time, as the sun,
changes their tourist. Next, breath-taking steeps and valleys;
then a Grotto for those the passage has undone
attended by a kind-faced river-god.
Then, for sheer swagger, creation clipped to dream,
the topiary-work, the artist's little
joke on Nature, horse-play with be and seem.
Courage challenged, trusting the maker, one
may enter a Maze and step by step, deeper
into bewilderment, find in the yews
the cool and colder rehearsal of the sleeper
who loses in darkness time, place, others,
sense of self. But no, this is not that last
labyrinth of Minotaur or tomb,
and a string one hadn't noticed leads back fast,
the strong string that ties art to serious play.

And now the woods, where "art is used but to
conceal art." Light and dark and the dapple
of both are inside. Here and there a few
bright lines of birches sketch the merest hint
of happiness for all lost children, old
and young, scattering breadcrumbs in hope of home,
for lovers meeting in secret, Tristan, Isolde.
Strange, rare trees have been planted to look
at home with the colloquial. Deep
but penetrable, the woods release their guest,
having shown him beds of fern and heart's-ease they keep.
What loving lavishness creates such gardens--
worlds of thought and feeling as real as the world?
It is late. One stops and rests near a flowery fountain,
thinking with joy of what the tour unfurled,
thoughts that turn one's head toward a last far view,
the eye being led uphill by an aisle of green
between marbles of calm Athena and hurrying Eros
where the beautiful Folly of having lived can be seen.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394584449
• ISBN 13: 9780394584447
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 69