Near Changes
by Mona Van Duyn
Summary
Near Changes gathers poems written from deep inside a long marriage, Mona Van Duyn's own marriage to the critic Jarvis Thurston, by then in its fifth decade, along with poems about illness, aging parents, and the modest, recurring work of tending a garden. Nothing in the book reaches for a dramatic subject. Instead Van Duyn finds her material in the small renegotiations any long relationship requires, an argument settled, a habit accommodated, and in the physical facts of getting older, a friend's illness, a body that no longer does what it once did without being asked twice.
Van Duyn writes in flexible lines that often edge close to traditional meter without locking into it fully, a plainspoken surface that rewards a slower, more careful reading than it first appears to ask for. She treats Midwestern, middle class domestic life, the kind of material a great deal of American poetry had considered too small to bear real weight, as fully sufficient ground for serious meditation, finding in a garden bed or a decades old marriage the same metaphysical stakes another poet might look for in war or a grand historical event.
Reading Near Changes means slowing down for poems that do not announce their own importance, trusting that a marriage's ordinary friction and a garden's yearly cycle can carry as much feeling as more obviously dramatic material. It suits a reader drawn to poetry of settled adult life rather than youth or crisis, and to a voice that treats domestic contentment, not as something to escape from in a poem, but as genuinely difficult, interesting material in its own right.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Mona Van Duyn the 1991 Prize for Poetry for Near Changes, over finalists Anthony Hecht's The Transparent Man and Gerald Stern's Leaving Another Kingdom. Van Duyn had already won the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1971, so the Pulitzer confirmed rather than launched a reputation built over decades teaching at Washington University in St. Louis and co founding and editing the journal Perspective with her husband, the critic Jarvis Thurston.
In 1992 Van Duyn became the first woman appointed under the renamed title of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, following six women who had earlier served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress before that name change. Later poets and critics noted that her own career fluctuated between real acclaim and long stretches of comparative obscurity, despite a body of major honors that few of her contemporaries matched.