Firefall: Poems - Softcover

Van Duyn, Mona

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679752803 ISBN 13: 9780679752806

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1994

Synopsis

Short "minimalist sonnets" and longer poems recall incidents from the poet's childhood and youth

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 Liter

From the Inside Flap

n's most recent collection is splendidly varied: witty, moving, sometimes astonishing. As Howard Nemerov said of her last book, "It is not only that the best of her poems teaches us so much about life, but that life, over a long time, teaches us the truth about these poems."

From the brief poems she calls "minimalist sonnets" to the powerful long poems "Falls" and "Delivery," both recalling incidents from childhood and youth, the work in this extraordinary book is that of a poet reaching the depths and heights of her own talent.

A companion to this one, If It Be Not I: Collected Poems 1959-1982, restores to print in one substantial book all of her work from Merciful Disguises and Letters from a Father.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679752803
• ISBN 13: 9780679752806
• Binding: Paperback