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Selected Poems.

ProQuest One Literature Available online

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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
Van Duyn, Mona
Contributor:
Poets Laureate Collection (Library of Congress)
Standardized Title:
Poems. Selections
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
American poetry--20th century.
American poetry.
Women poets, American.
Physical Description:
1 online resource
Edition:
1st ed.
Place of Publication:
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
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 Christmas 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. Bedtime Stories
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".
Notes:
Preliminaries omitted.
ISBN:
0-307-54557-1
OCLC:
842857301

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