Near Changes: Poems - Hardcover

Van Duyn, Mona

 
9780394584447: Near Changes: Poems
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0394584449 ISBN 13: 9780394584447
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1990

Inhaltsangabe

Presents a new collection of poetry by the National Book Award- and Bolligen Prize-winning poet-author of "Merciful Disguises"

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

Aus dem Klappentext

n's Near Changes is a valuable addition to contemporary American poetry. This work provides a variety of riches surpassing even that of her earlier work. For wit, inventiveness, true feeling and a sharp eye for the passing scene, there is no one better than she.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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"Gardens" (for Anthony Hecht)

I

Someone once described the Japanese garden
as "trivialities arranged to look
significant." So might we label one kind
of poem, whose dry hint of a river or brook,
raked free of detritus, briefly flows, turns
into terraces (abstraction of waterfall)
and comes to its end in a large, strict rectangle
of the same white sand (the sea, the All
or Nothingness), whose stone showing its white
above the moss that wraps its lower part
can be read as a high mountain, forested
and snowcapped, in this metaphoric art.
Guided by its setting in white space
proportionally vast, the making mind
of the beholder, which walks hand in hand
with the austere creator, fast will find
one dwarf pine's looming. Shading, importance, meaning
tower from the green suggestion. Delicacy
molds throughout a narrow path between Nature's
carelessness and the lifeless rigidity
of perfect order. A world is here that returns
to pure idea when we look away,
its grasp on our hearts being as miniature
as the memory of one faultless, serene day.

II

But there is another kind of garden, another
poetry (might we say?) whose "mimicry
of endlessness" calls upon every muscle
of self, while the senses are whelmed toward idolatry.
To enter its rich acreage is to know
that much must be left for another day, or year
or season. Though Flora stands in stone, her kingdoms
of brilliant imagery cloud over or clear--
rosebeds, meadows of daffodil, rainbow
borders, wild blooms under treeshade--as time, as the sun,
changes their tourist. Next, breath-taking steeps and valleys;
then a Grotto for those the passage has undone
attended by a kind-faced river-god.
Then, for sheer swagger, creation clipped to dream,
the topiary-work, the artist's little
joke on Nature, horse-play with be and seem.
Courage challenged, trusting the maker, one
may enter a Maze and step by step, deeper
into bewilderment, find in the yews
the cool and colder rehearsal of the sleeper
who loses in darkness time, place, others,
sense of self. But no, this is not that last
labyrinth of Minotaur or tomb,
and a string one hadn't noticed leads back fast,
the strong string that ties art to serious play.

And now the woods, where "art is used but to
conceal art." Light and dark and the dapple
of both are inside. Here and there a few
bright lines of birches sketch the merest hint
of happiness for all lost children, old
and young, scattering breadcrumbs in hope of home,
for lovers meeting in secret, Tristan, Isolde.
Strange, rare trees have been planted to look
at home with the colloquial. Deep
but penetrable, the woods release their guest,
having shown him beds of fern and heart's-ease they keep.
What loving lavishness creates such gardens--
worlds of thought and feeling as real as the world?
It is late. One stops and rests near a flowery fountain,
thinking with joy of what the tour unfurled,
thoughts that turn one's head toward a last far view,
the eye being led uphill by an aisle of green
between marbles of calm Athena and hurrying Eros
where the beautiful Folly of having lived can be seen.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1990
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0394584449
ISBN 13 
9780394584447
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
69
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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