SOURCE: "Violent Desires," in New York Times Book Review, Vol. 95, November 18, 1990, p. 24.

In the following excerpt, Hirsh commends Van Duyn's "pathos and wit" in Near Changes.

Mona Van Duyn has a gift for making the ordinary appear strange and for turning a common situation into a metaphysical exploration. She is, as she says, a poet of "serious play"—extravagant, large-spirited, querulous—a John Donne of the postwar American suburbs who combines a breezy colloquial formalism with an underlying violence of feeling. Her most characteristic poems move on the wings of extended figuration, worrying metaphors into conceits and crackling with odd, humorous rhymes ("The world's perverse, / but it could be worse," she writes in "Sonnet for Minimalists") that belie their darker emotional depths. Inventiveness is both sword and shield; wit is her weapon and protection. She is a poet of "merciful disguises."

Near Changes, Ms. Van Duyn's seventh book...