Selected poems / Mona Van Duyn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Van Duyn, Mona.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century.

American poetry.

Poetry.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

viii, 218 pages, 3 unnumbered pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First paperback edition.

Other Title:

Selected poems, Mona Van Duyn

Mona Van Duyn, selected poems

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Summary:

This selection of the author's award-winning work spans four decades. Beginning with her classic Valentines to the Wide World (1959), encompassing the intimate voice of Bedtime Stories (1972) and the moving Letters from a Father (1982), crowned by the life-spanning Firefall (1993), Selected Poems reacquaints us with a poet whose ear is keenly tuned to the music of nature and human conversation. In lively and varied forms, from her minimalist sonnets to her magisterial longer pieces, she captures a multiplicity of worlds within her world, in a tone inflected by both Midwestern pragmatism and a deep metaphysical intelligence. As she contemplates the act of reading in bed, a Rhenish sculpture in the Cloisters, or the loss of her mother, the poet goes beyond context to discover consciousness: an expression of the larger ideas and emotions, finally, the art, in the smallest details of our lives. She was the U.S. poet laureate, 1992-1993.

Contents:

Valentines to the Wide World, 1959. Three valentines to the wide world

The Gentle snorer

Woman waiting

Death by aesthetics

A relative and an absolute

A kind of music

Toward a definition of marriage

A Time of Bees, 1964. Elementary attitudes

Recovery

Pot-au-Feu

Notes from a suburban heart

Quebec Suite

Earth tremors felt in Missouri

A garland for Christopher Smart

The Gardener to his God

Sestina for warm seasons

Open letter, Personal

An Annual and Perennial problem

To See, to Take, 1970. A Cristmas card, after the assassinations

Causes

Leda

The Creation

The Pieta, Rhenish, 14th C., the Cloisters

Advice to a God

Billings and cooings from the Berkeley Barb (Want-Ad Section)

Footnotes to The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

Postcards from Cape Split

In the hospital for tests

Remedies, maladies, reasons

Open letter from a Constant Reader

The Miser

Relationships

The Twins

Leda reconsidered

Bedtime Stories, 1972. Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Nine

Twelve

New Poems from Merciful Disguises, 1973. Peony stalks

Midas and wife

Economics

The Talker

The Cities of the plain

A small excursion

End of May

What the motorcycle said

A view

Letters from a Father, and Other Poems, 1982. Lives of the poets

Growing up askew

Photographs

The Stream

In the Missouri Ozarks

Moose in the morning, Northern Maine

The Learners

Caring for surfaces

The Vision test

The Ballad of Blossom

Near Changes, 1990.

Birthstones

Late loving

Views

Pigeon eggs

In bed with a book

To a friend who threw away hair dyes

Gardens

The Insight lady of St. Louis on zoos

The Block

Memoir

Headlines

Double Sonnet for Minimalists

Sonnet for Minimalists

Firefall, 1993. Addendum to "The Block"

The Marriage sculptor

Poets in late winter

Rascasse

"We are in your area"

Endings

For May Swenson

Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat in the kitchen

Late wishes

Insiders

Long stretch

The Beginning

Miranda grows up

Closures

Falls

The Delivery

Notes to "Firefall".

A note about the author.

Notes:

Hardcover edition published April 2002. First paperback edition published November 2003 -- T.p. verso.

"A Borzoi book"--Title page verso.

ISBN:

9780375709807

0375709800

OCLC:

55471578