Born in Iowa and a longtime St. Louis resident, Van Duyn will be 81 years old this year; over the course of her career she has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Prize, and she has served as U.S. Poet Laureate. Her If It Be Not I: Collected Poems 1959–1982
compiles her acutely emotional poems about deceptively ordinary domestic experiences. This book offers fewer poems from each volume than that collection, but includes selections from books published in 1990 and 1993. In poems like "Letters from a Father," "Photographs" and "The Stream," Van Duyn addresses at aching length the problems of being an aging daughter of two aging and ornery parents: "I see your loving look wherever I go./ What is love? Truly I do not know./ Sometimes, perhaps, instead of a great sea,/ it is a narrow stream running urgently/ ...Here at my feet I see, after sixty years,/ the welling water— to which I add these tears." Unlike her exact contemporary (and Knopf list-mate) Marie Ponsot, Van Duyn does not write metaphysical poems—her use of direct exposition gives a bluff and hearty humor to verse like "The Vision Test." When the poet renews her driver's license and tells the clerk that her profession is "poet," "Her pencil's still. She turns away from me/ to the waiting crowd, tips back her head like a hen/ drinking clotted milk, and her 'Ha ha hee hee hee'/ of hysterical laughter rings through the room. Again/ 'Oh, ha ha ha ha hee hee hee.'" Readers will find such wry self-positions throughout this collection, and will come to understand what all the fuss has been about. (Apr.)
Forecast:Since owners of the
Collected and Van Duyn's two subsequent books have this work in convenient form already, this book is clearly designed to bring in new readers. With a crowded field in the wake of National Poetry Month, however, review attention may be diverted to less familiar work.
