Van Duyn's Rich Broth

...Firefall (Knopf, 83 pp., $20.00), Van Duyn's eighth collection, displays her disarming eloquence at its peak as she celebrates "the rich broth of life, whose bubble eyes/hold both the unseen and the seen...

...The Delivery," an autobiographical meditation on her development, at age five, of a sense of self, movingly depicts people as swimmers: "the floundering, floating or sinking/human herd, whose armstrokes, frail, awry,/frantic, hold up their heads to inhale the sky"??cloud-filled and sublime, yet indifferent to their fate...

...What once looked random suddenly acquires shape, purpose, meaning...

...Falls," for instance, recaptures her upbringing in "Grant Wood country": "Anger, resentment, self-pity, what were they/but weeds to be chopped out fast to make room for the/ crop, the only crop that rich land wanted"??corn, which came "marching in its stiff green to the very edge, / grudging the trail its ground...

...A later trip to Niagara Falls strengthened her association of tongues of fire and water with torrents of metaphorical language...

...attachment to a place or book...

...The child of Iowa farmers, she grew up struggling to understand her own natural attraction to form, language and metaphor, hoping to make herself comprehensible to the no-nonsense literalists around her...

...what gives comfort, what creates but ugliness...

...pointing to where,/up, in the passionate strain, lives everything fair/before she flails back to the loved, the illumined air...

...The result is so funny that readers may overlook the technical virtuosity involved...

...and the font, never empty of its holy store, may bathe the eyes that they may see the world as no one but the gods have seen before...

...Indeed, far more than a short-term laureate, she has become a national literary treasure...

...Van Duyn's playfulness with language is perhaps best displayed in the more sustained "Christmas Present for a Poet...

...What began us but slime...

...Van Duyn describes the awe of encountering this astounding phenomenon, demonstrating how those stinted in their education can discover the idea of the sublime in nature: Out of some secret opening in the sky the first blazing streaks began to pour towards the earth, the rent in the darkness widened and widened to let fall a dazzling creek, then more and more cascaded down the dark until a full river of radiance from abstemious heaven made its slow unbroken, quivering reach for whatever bed on unknown ground would be given...

...As it happened, however, her father himself harbored a yen for beauty and adventure...

...She, too, has command of a variety of prosodic forms, yet can evoke the tones of ordinary speech even in the most complex of them...

...Omnipotent dark has seized them./She can only sink with each one as far as light/can enter, meet drowning eyes...

...Although Van Duyn treats painful episodes??affection misused or broken by death??as vividly as contentment or elation, she applauds every effort to reach out beyond one's self and form alliances with others...

...through the subtle shifts and adjustments within a close, long-term marriage...

...Highly regarded by her peers, winner of nearly every major literary prize and fellowship, she possesses a quality that succeeds in bridging the gulf between readers attuned to structure and metaphor, and those who look primarily for story and idea...

...Van Duyn's autobiographical verses are among her strongest and most engaging...

...Eventually he bought a camper, and the family drove to Yosemite National Park, where they witnessed the Firefall, a nightly display of burning embers dropped in a stream from a high cliff...

...In addition, whether applying her pen to free verse or rhymed iambic, elaborate narrative or "minimalist sonnet," she maintains a characteristically pellucid style that brims with feeling but is never overwrought...

...The recipient of the gift has complained that the yellow and black striped Henley shirt makes the wearer look like a "hornet," and adds that the only possible rhyme with that is "hairnet...

...If those she cannot reach go under she cannot save them??/how could she save them...

...The essence of Van Duyn's attraction is her ability to take any incident, whether commonplace or remarkable, and make it the key piece that turns the whole jigsaw puzzle into a recognizable picture...

...Louis neighbors and writing colleagues...

...Never blind to the dark side of life, the poet observes, "We see the skin of the earth and it is beautiful,/but what formless fury fills earth's bowels and fuels us...

...The new work once again explores her enduring theme, love, in all its diversity: from the misunderstandings that complicate the bond between parent and child...

...Thus, out of her insecurity, revulsion, fear of death, and heartbreak, she forges wise and brilliant poetry...

...She writes as if the reader were seated across from her??a welcome, familiar guest eager to be entertained by a warm and ever-inquiring intelligence...

...But here, surrounded by derision's brambles and weeds, a humble vision that reveals of the priceless welling one drop only, somehow continues to work its own miracles, heals...

...She rationalizes that, since "forever the spirit wants to be embodied," a ghost might try any form...

...and the dangerous excitement of extramarital affairs...

...The skeptic envisions a body of work half nostalgic, half sentimental??falling somewhere between 19th-century ballad and 1950s popular song, or else consisting of vulgarizations a la Carl Sandburg...

...This spectacle fanned her vague yearnings into a blaze of ambition to write...

...It turns out to be only a baby crow, but in a mysterious way it does herald her friend's demise...

...The poet's parents chided her for her interest in books and college...

...In the contemporary literary climate, praising a poet as easy to read can be off-putting...

...Both in this collection and its immediate predecessor, Near Changes (1991), she offers perfect examples of her "minimalist sonnets"??pithy, humorous squibs somewhat akin to the "gnomes" of her late friend and poetic foil, Howard Nemerov...

...Who could have guessed from what some careless hand had broadcast??these few tiniest, dimmest sparks in the dark soil of the sky??that the sky was hiding more brilliance than it could hint at, a hidden lark whispered perhaps of things called symphonies...

...Van Duyn's perceptions all issue from her conviction that we are engaged in a perpetual struggle against Time, which robs us of treasured people, places and possessions as it prods us along toward the inevitable "dreary midnight of death...

...to the revelations and consolations of friendship...

...Her directness and clarity recall a distinguished line of lyric Midwestern voices that includes Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale and Edward Arlington Robinson...

...Eruption" wittily portrays illicit love as a volcano's violent explosion, concluding, "How the world justly fears/the Vesuvius heart...

...Firefall contains a series of elegies that, though poignant, combine the humorous and grotesque...

...Against this inexorable diminishment, she insists, we can at least register protest with our power of words: "For what is story if not relief from pain/of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless...

...By the end of the poem, these "kernel hints" have flowered into a cumulative image of her craft, linking the landscape of her upbringing with the message she derived from the falls: "My field unamplified as the voice of one bird's/in the corn, I fall, rise, praise, fall,/sowing and tilling my single crop??Words...

...Words...

...By maintaining the Petrarchan or English rhyme scheme and the traditional 14 lines, but radically shortening their length, she has devised a unique form ideal for conveying light verse's ironic aphorisms...

...They saw little sense in such things, especially for a girl, who presumably would give it all up for marriage anyway...

...Also in this volume, Van Duyn uses a splendid image to acknowledge the shortcomings of the social attachments she finds so vital...

...At one point, alarmed by a birdlike apparition flapping against her window, she takes the commotion as a signal from a dying friend...

...what fertilizes butmuck...

...Knopf has simultaneously issued a compilation of her first six books in a companion volume, If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982...

...Mona Van Duyn possesses "a heart so unwearied," to borrow a phrase of hers, that she can continually combine perspectives amusing and profound, tragic and joyful, awestruck and ironic, bright and dark...

...Few, if any, living poets give greater pleasure to readers...

...Van Duyn's oeuvre does not remotely fit either category...

...Lest these quotations make her sound overly earnest, a sibylline, George Eliot-type of writer, it should be noted that Van Duyn also excels as a comic poet...

...compassion for the unfortunate...

...the loyalty of pets...

...In "A Dog Lover's Confession" she holds up "pain and peace in one thing" as preferable to unswerving devotion by comparing the excitement of contrasts to a Dalmatian's dappled coat...

...In her view, the imperfect is preferable to an unattainable ideal, as she makes clear in the concluding stanza of "Words for the Dumb": Cathedral love, in the hushed greatness of gold and lovely tints of rainbow, kneeling down in illusion's flickering candlelight, may see, or hope to see, time itself uncrowned, replaced by the eternal...

...The dogs belonging to Thomas Hardy and Amy Lowell??dearer than people to their poet-owners??are memorialized alongside Van Duyn's departed St...

...Van Duyn then proceeds through 16 additional farfetched off-rhymes, such as "highernote," "horror-naught" and "howornate," all the while apologizing for the unintended insult the present occasioned...