Near Changes

by Mona van Duyn

Mona Van Duyn'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.

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Mona Jane van Duyn was an American poet. She was appointed poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1992.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Near Changes by Mona Van Duyn

This short collection of poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991.

Poems that I especially liked.

1. At the New Orleans Zoo - anyone who can write a beautiful poem about baby giraffes is okay in my book.

2. On a Majolica Sunflower Plate - wonderful personification of a sunflower staring down a menacing sun.

3. Cotton Wagons - scenes of a country drive that turns from the beauty of a cotton wagon with loose pieces of cotton going to the wind and then to a truck which looks like cotton spilling over but is actually caged chickens for slaughter whose feathers are dotting the highway.

4. A Bouquet of Zinnias - a simple and descriptive observational poem about zinnias.

5. The Burning of Yellowstone - a vivid perspective on sunsets.

I enjoyed the visual nature of this collection. The poems are not so pretty when read aloud as the imagery rather than wordplay is the objective.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

In my never-ending attempt to read the work of Poet Laureates of the U. S. and the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, I literally stumbled on this volume by Mona Van Duyn. This book won the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1991. I'm afraid I was left unimpressed. Try as I might, I couldn't connect. There were a few times I went back and read the poem again, trying to see not only what it was saying literally, but also what it might be saying metaphorically. Failing that, I tried to see if I could connect something to my own experience or life. I even read "The Ferris Wheel" three times, when I learned that it sort of was written in response to Graham Greene's scene on the ferris wheel in "The Third Man." Alas, no luck. I just couldn't make any meaningful connections. I think I am ultimately going to fail in my education in poetry.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to cheat on this one and give you my impression of Mona Van Duyn's poetry by quoting from my review of her "Selected Poems":

"The majority of the book is so enjoyable that I stopped doing my usual marking of favorites because they all were worth re-reading. Even before I was finished with it, I began looking for other work of hers and discovered that she won the Pulitzer in 1990 for her book Near Changes.

"Van Duyn enjoys form, especially rhyme, but she isn't at all slavish to it. Part of the fun of her work is her off-off-rhymes. Sometimes they aren't really rhymes at all but words with sounds similarities that vary: brown, grin; brush, backwash.

"Van Duyn's poems most often begin as observations of everyday life. Sometimes they become a meditation and sometimes they remain an observation but enlivened with original language. I never read far without running into a sense of humor about herself and life."

All of the above is also true of Near Changes and also of my response to her work. I love it. I love the way she plays with the sounds of words and with forms, as ready to adhere to them as to bend them to her sense of humor.

Reading this after Joshua Mehigan's "Accepting the Disaster," I realize that these days I want a book that gives me a sense of comfort and joy. Van Duyn's poetry is "comfortable" because of her humor and willingness to handle unpoetic, everyday things or situations. I recognize them. The subjects aren't necessarily always comforting but she seems like an extremely talented neighbor who you can count on to deliver the local news in a unique way that makes you want her to repeat it because there's at least as much going on with the language as with the topic. The joy for me is watching that language play. That is why I'll keep this book and wonder why I waited 5 years (5 years!) before getting another of her books. I need to make myself a schedule for rereading them. They are not books to just be left on the shelf.

On Receiving a Postcard from Japan

"If you can eat breakfast together," the gods said,
"(we've made up a little game) it will always be morning.
We've dammed back the tides of time and set a table
where the balked sea would whelm over with no warning."

Our beds were so far from each other that when I woke,
growing more ravenous with every scream,
I could not tear you with just an untouching voice
away from the lavish banquet of your dream.

Wanting the prize, fearing the dark water,
fighting the greedy senses, I tried to wait.
But as I sat starving the gods piled higher and higher
platters of fragrant temptations, and I ate.

Swimming and diving through the deep salt years,
wondering what you might be going to retrieve,
holding your breath, eyes stinging, feeling your way,
you came to the table I could not bear to leave.

But you'd grown gills from the long, passionate journey.
Smiling, you sit at ease on the gods' game-ground,
and in tender aqueous light of early morning
eat a late breakfast of sea-weed where I drowned.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 1 out of 5]

These poems are infused with sadness.  I would not want to view the world the way Van Duyn viewed the world, always finding the sorrow in beauty, the pain in happiness, the mistake in the whole.  I thought I was a cynic, but she took it to the next level. Even a poem about a bouquet of zinnias talks about their death, "they hang their heads at the end," and ends with talk of other flowers in the garden with bruised petals.  Not one of these poems resonated with me.  

I felt like Van Duyn was focused on her own mortality, deeply unhappy with her life, and angry with the world because of that, and doing her best to take it out on her readers. This is the first time I've been so out of synch with a collection from a US Poet Laureate (AND a Pulitzer winner to boot!).

The author bio set me off to start:  "Mona Van Duyn (Mrs Jarvis Thurston) was born in ..."  I wondered "was this book published a long time ago and I'm confused???"  But no, it was published in 1990.  Surely we were past the point of referring to women as possessions of their men??  In 1990, I considered "Mrs His Name" to be hopelessly antiquated and sexist.  Why is her bio written like that?  Did she write this?  Was her publisher hopelessly sexist? Is that why she seems so sad??

From the very first page, I feel sadness.  Her dedication:  "For Jarvis and for my friends, who fill to the brim a life empty of family."  It's not just for beloved Jarvis and her friends, it's "oh by the way my life is empty, except for you."  Why was her life empty of family?  Did that bring her constant sadness?  Was she estranged from her family?   Did she always feel this hole in her life that she desperately needed to fill with friends?  I have no siblings, myself, but I have cousins, I have family.

[Kyle Bartsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This thing won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991, but I don’t quite see why. It’s good, there is some solid poetry here with some social commentary thrown here and there but for me, there just feels like there’s no emotion put in. It feels sort of hollow, and trite. Maybe I’m missing something because I see very little that would be Pulitzer worthy. It’s not horrible by any means, just not amazing.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

****

[M.F. Sutherland · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection felt frayed around the edges, and I tend to enjoy more lyrical works rather than sporadic visual tangents.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating closer to 3.7 stars for lots of good poetry and some not as good. I know this is a vague critique, but I don't get a strong feeling for this poet.

[Diann Blakely]

Readers of MERCIFUL DISGUISES: PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED POEMS (1959-1973) and LETTERS FROM A FATHER (1982), already knew Van Duyn to be one of the eminent women writers of her generation. NEAR CHANGES, the Pulitzer-winning collection which followed, typifies Van Duyn's work: pleasant, witty, and occasional poems primarily in the traditional forms that predominate. Thus she served as a sort of godmother for many younger neo-formalist poets, particularly Molly Peacock and Mary Jo Salter, whose ability to fuse the conversational, even the colloquial, with received patterns of rhyme and meter may one day be referred to as "Van Duynesque," and doubtless she will continue in this role for generations to come.

Especially beccause Van Duyn was more wily and feminist than she might at first appear. That she was a passionate revisionist is obvious: "Leda" and "Leda Reconsidered" appeared in the 1970 TO SEE, TO TAKE, which was honored with both the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize, while "The Insight Lady of St. Louis on Zoos" and "Glad Heart at the Supermarket," included in NEAR CHANGES, can be seen as rewriting in a lighter vein of two of Randall Jarrell's most famous poems.

Yet Van Duyn never excluded the larger world from her poems, as a reading of "In Bed with a Book" and "Misers" in NEAR CHANGES makes plain. Even those not fortunate enough to have heard Van Duyn read during her lifetime will surely feel rewarded by attuning themselves to her voice--sometimes humorous and always humane--as it resonates from the page.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of Van Duyn is totally inscrutable to me, but I like this book.