SOURCE: "A Common Sadness," in New York Times Book Review, Vol. 88, March 13, 1983, p. 6.

In the following review, Rosenthal provides a laudatory assessment of Letters from A Father, and Other Poems.

Mona Van Duyn seems a naturally ebullient sort, a humorous love-welcomer who sturdily overbears disgust, resentment and the tears of things. Her style is anecdotal and expansive….

Mona Van Duyn is such an engaging spirit a reader almost forgets the dark awareness with which she copes. Her title poem, "Letters From a Father," starts her book off with an epistolary tale that has a happy ending—that is, for the time being. It consists of six successive "letters" from a small-town, country-bred, octogenarian father to his poet daughter. These highly colloquial letters, compressed and adapted to a loose line of five or six stresses and a pattern of alternating rhymes and half-rhymes, are handled masterfully. They begin as...