Linda Pastan

An Early Afterlife

"The world wounds us / with its beauty, as if it knew / we had to leave it soon," Linda Pastan writes in "In a Northern Country," and the poems in this new volume are full of those wounds, that beauty. Whether her subject is the return of childhood ghosts or the metaphor of baseball, whether it is the impact of landscape or the vagaries of family love, Pastan continues to explore and illuminate the mysteries and dangers beneath the common surfaces of ordinary life. As the Jerusalem Post put it, "She has, in large measure, fulfilled Emerson's dream—the revelation of 'the miraculous in the common.'" Or, as she herself writes in one of her new poems, "Long after Eden, the imagination flourishes with all its unruly weeds."