One of the prevailing themes of Linda Pastan's poetry is the complexity of domestic life. In what she terms "the war between desire and dailiness," Pastan "dissects the tension that divides womanly rituals of motherhood and housekeeping from the solitary rites of the poet," wrote Phoebe Pettingell in the New Leader. Pastan relies on imagery and metaphor to infuse ordinary domestic matters with mystery and magic in a style reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, who, according to Dave Smith in the American Poetry Review, "took her dailiness to the heights of metaphysical vision. . . . It may be, Dickinson is Pastan's ghost, though less perhaps in sound than in what to look at and how to show it." Pastan's style is simple and understated; her poetry, therefore, is "never baroque, never sentimental, never suffused with a militant feminism," observed Samuel Hazo in the Hudson Review. Commenting on the economy of her language, Chicago Tribune Book World contributor L. M. Rosenberg wrote that Pastan "knows the force of what's left unsaid, the importance of the white space around the written word. This makes her a poet of elegant spareness."

Pastan's "material chose her," commented Pettingell, "when she interrupted her writing career to [marry and] raise a family." The interruption immediately followed Pastan's graduation from Radcliffe, where, in her senior year, she won the Mademoiselle poetry contest. The runner-up was Sylvia Plath. Unlike Plath, however, Pastan relinquished her writing. "I was into the whole '50s thing, kids and the clean floor bit," she told Washington Post writer Michael Kernan. "I was unhappy because I knew what I should be doing." Pastan explained that her husband, tired "of hearing what a great writer I would have been if I hadn't got married," urged her to take her work seriously and write while the children were in school. Since that time, Pastan has dedicated herself to her poetry; her efforts were rewarded in 1983 when PM/AM: New and Selected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award.

In Waiting for My Life, a title that alludes to Pastan's interrupted writing career, "she broods on the rewards as well as the risks of domesticity," commented Sandra M. Gilbert in Parnassus. One of those risks, according to Pastan, is that those who are unfamiliar with domesticity will equate it with mundaneness. Gilbert, for example, wondered, "Is it because she is quite self-consciously a woman poet that Pastan so austerely ordains the necessity of acquiescence in the ordinary?" In "Who Is It Accuses Us?" Pastan defends both her lifestyle and her poetry by suggesting that domesticity is hazardous and requires physical and emotional fortitude. Another poem, "The War between Desire and Dailiness," explores the conflict "between longing and order, body and soul, the woman and the poet," according to J. D. McClatchy in Poetry. At the end of the poem Pastan declares, "Let dailiness win," and though "it sounds as if she has chosen safety, . . . the line ends [the] poem with anything but conviction," observed Smith.

Waiting for My Life also depicts "parents musing on the lives of grown children, on their own altered flesh, the weather or, the slackened but not dead fevers of desire, those moments spent at windows in kitchens or gardens where we are astonished at the speed and movement that is all the not-us," Smith explained. In "Meditation by the Stove," for instance, Pastan describes a housewife who contemplates neglecting her duties. Pettingell remarked that while there is "menace implicit" in the concluding lines "And I have banked the fires of my body / into a small domestic flame for others / to warm their hands on for a while," Pastan "knows what price men and women pay for domesticity, while realizing that not even poets want to live entirely alone, without responsibilities."

Both her subject matter and unaffected writing style make Pastan an accessible poet. Several critics noted, however, that Pastan sometimes sacrifices subtlety for accessibility. Mary Jo Salter, for example, commented in the Washington Post Book World that Waiting for My Life "is sometimes simple to a fault," citing the simile "the white curtains blow / like ghosts of themselves." Similarly, Chicago Tribune Book World contributor L. M. Rosenberg described Pastan's poetry as "occasionally too easy" but later conceded that her "work is its own argument against charges of insufficiency." Peter Stitt, on the other hand, maintained in the Georgia Review that Pastan "does not cause brain strain, like the early Mark Strand, and she does not leave us breathless, sweating, far from civilization, like Galway Kinnell—but she is a wonderful writer nevertheless and works in a rich, human vein." Waiting for My Life "is full of surprises that make it far from daily," concluded Smith. "It keeps a low heat, but it is radiant heat nonetheless."

One way Pastan elevates her subject matter is through metaphor. As Stephen Dobyns observed in the Washington Post Book World: "It is metaphor that drives all her poems, that lifts them from the mundane and gives them their degree of magic. . . . The poems are strongest when the commentary combines with the mysterious through metaphor to give us a new sense of the world, to make us see what has become commonplace as if for the first time." In The Five Stages of Grief, arranged according to the stages outlined in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying, Pastan writes not only about death, but about death as a metaphor for "loss through divorce, adultery, argument, aging, children leaving home, identity crisis, silence, and innocence/wisdom," wrote Karla Hammond in the Prairie Schooner. Several of the poems describe a discontented married woman who, after experiencing denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, finally reaches acceptance when she realizes that "even though their relationship has been strained to the point that it is no longer satisfactory to [her], she can find comfort only with her husband, with the familiar, with the imperfect," observed Benjamin Franklin V in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

This metaphor "of the breaking marriage . . . is not a literal truth referring to the poet's life (other poems make this unmistakably clear) but a metaphor standing for the issue of loss and abandonment generally, as our children disappear from us into their own lives, as our parents disappear into their deaths, and so on," noted Stitt. "If there is an ultimate truth" in The Five Stages of Grief, "it is that grief (embodied in loss, separation, and death) like history, is a 'circular staircase' from which there is no human escape," commented Hammond, who later concluded that "this is a moving work in its subtlety, intensity and matter-of-factness. . . . It touches the lives of each of us on our journey from denial to acceptance."

In PM/AM Pastan again "stresses the mystery of the ordinary, the strangeness to which we wake each 'AM' and out of which we lapse each 'PM,'" wrote Gilbert. The early morning hours are especially important to Pastan, for she begins to write as soon as she wakes, hoping to "surprise her mind before the visions melt, while it is still running loose in that landscape of wishes, still detached from the engines of reason," according to Michael Kernan in the Washington Post. These fragments of dreams play a significant role in Pastan's writing, although, as she explained to Kernan, "it's not a matter of transcribing actual dreams, . . . but of using the unconscious state and its strange associations and the insights you get from them." Pastan's interest in the dream state manifests itself in several of the poems in PM/AM. "Waking," for example, describes the process of awakening as "watching our dreams move / helplessly away like fading / lantern fish." And in "Dreams," originally published in Waiting for My Life, Pastan observes that dreams transport us to "the place where the children / we were / rock in the arms of the children / we have become." It is poems like these that "reveal a complex, original imagination finding magic in the commonplace and making dreams universally intelligible," wrote Detroit News contributor Edward Morin.

The publication of PM/AM prompted several critics to review Pastan's progress as a writer. Kernan commented that in this book, "the sense of self-observation seems to have grown more acute, both in the quality of the observations and in the merciless cutting of lines and words . . . to clutch at some essence." New York Times Book Review contributor Hugh Seidman remarked: "One cannot deny that [Pastan's] vision has gained in depth over the years. [PM/AM] has a stateliness and solidity of tone not reached in earlier [books], and there is evidence of more emotional opening out in some of her newest pieces." Even those earlier poems "that seemed minor and fragmentary [the] first time around," wrote a Publishers Weekly critic, "are transformed by the unity of their context" in PM/AM. Her poems, concluded Voyages critic Roderick Jellema, continue to "quietly unmake the set of the mind as they cut apart, deepen, and then reunify the ingredients of simple experience. And that's where discoveries about our lives and our world are made."

The Imperfect Paradise is a collection of poems in which Pastan writes of love and grief. Mortality, death, loss of a loved one, happiness, spiritual and physical love, and marital crisis are among the topics she explores, revealing her deepest thoughts, beliefs, and fears. Grace Bauer in the Library Journal called Pastan's poems "direct and passionate, yet controlled." Bruce Bennett, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented that "Ms. Pastan's unfailing mastery of her medium holds the darkness firmly in check," continuing on to conclude: "Enmeshed in the 'imperfect paradise' that constitutes our common life, Ms. Pastan sounds these depths ['whose measure we only guess'] in subtle and delicate ways."

Heroes in Disguise gathers poems on seasonal change, the resurfacing into adulthood of childhood experiences, and mortality. "Pastan like a seer delivers these poems," wrote Washington Post Book World contributor Kathy S. Cohen, who noted, "The clarity of middle age is here attached to the concept of generations." Most critics praise Pastan's serene tone of voice and insights into, as Lee Upton put it in a Belles Lettres review, "matters of creation and judgment." Upton concluded that, while "the collection might have been culled of a few slighter poems in the later section, the book as a whole reflects Pastan's inviting spirit." And Sandra M. Gilbert noted in Poetry that "despite her restraints and constraints, Pastan . . . seems to me to have—or, anyway, to seek—affinities with that American muse who descends from a strange meeting between our two greatest poets [Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson]." "Always interesting, balanced, seldom profound," wrote Dick Allen in Hudson Review, "this is a poetry we return to more for content than form, a poetry of the whole poem rather than the individual line."

Ellen Kaufman, reviewing Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998 for Library Journal, commented: "Thirty years worth of poems that celebrate the 'mystery of the ordinary.'. . . This volume may bring her work the critical attention it deserves." A Publishers Weekly critic commented that: "Pastan remains a consistent writer, ever frank, meditative and mournful."

In a similar vein, Pastan's The Last Uncle deals, as Louis McKee wrote in Library Journal, with "loss, with death, and other passings, and with the often curious journey through the stages of aging." In an interview for PreviewPort, Pastan revealed that, from the age of ten or eleven, she knew she wanted to spend her life writing. She took no actual writing classes, but worked "one on one on poems with J. V. Cunningham in graduate school at Brandeis." She commented that her works "have, do, and probably always will receive rejection, and that patience is the best way to deal with it."

August 2003

From this Issue

poetry-magazineWhy Are Your Poems so Dark?

poetry-magazineThe Night Before

poetry-magazineNever Night

Table of Contents

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?

The Night Before

Never Night