Mona Van Duyn is now Poet Laureate of the United States. Her most recent book, Near Changes, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for 1991. Her new collection, Firefall, 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 teach us so much about life, but that life, over a long time, teaches us the truth of 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 volume 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.