Mana Van Duyn'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. From the Trade Paperback edition. Van Duyn, poet laureate of the United States, is perhaps the most beloved American poet writing today. Her new work, Firefall , comes closely on the heels of Near Changes ( LJ 3/15/90), for which she won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize. Here are more of the occasional poems and "minimalist" sonnets that showcase her deep-cutting wit: "Duke, there are deserts with fountains where lovers tarry/ and those who die of thirst at the fountain-side,/ since for love to be real it must first be imaginary." But there are also longer poems like "Falls," about growing up in the repressed rural Midwest. Witnessing the "firefall"--a nightly Yosemite tourist attraction where embers were poured from a cliff--the speaker awakens to "her own heart's life" as a writer; seeing Niagara Falls for the first time, she anticipates a parallel sexual awakening: "Wild for the blind, helpless confinement to send me/ over the lip in a will-less fall, thrown/ from my safe observant stand, tossed, rammed,/ broken, drowned perhaps--but love alone . . ./ could build no barrel." Many of these poems talk about death, illness, and the loss of dear ones. Yet irony and humor are implicit in Van Duyn's sense that even final endings have afterwards. And here is a poet who, upon wondering if she has entered territory obscure to the reader, kindly provides notes. Van Duyn's work has been collected before. Her new collection, If It Be Not I , includes all previously published works except, unfortunately, Near Changes . Her two new volumes are very highly recommended. - Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. 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. From the Trade Paperback edition. 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 Literature in 1947, and co-edited it until 1970. She has been awarded the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize and the Eunice Tietjens Award from Poetry, and the Shelley Memorial Prize, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the NationalEndowment for the Arts. She has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. From the Trade Paperback edition. Used Book in Good Condition