An Early Afterlife

by Linda Pastan

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 surface 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.'

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

In 1932, Linda Pastan was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx. She graduated from Radcliffe College and received an MA from Brandeis University.

She is the author of Traveling Light (W. W. Norton & Co., 2011); Queen of a Rainy Country (2006); The Last Uncle (2002); Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998), which was nominated for the National Book Award; An Early Afterlife (l995); Heroes In Disguise (1991), The Imperfect Paradise (1988), a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (l982), which was nominated for the National Book Award; The Five Stages of Grief (l978), and A Perfect Circle of Sun (l971).

About Pastan's The Five Stages of Grief, the poet May Sarton said, "It is about all her integrity that has made Linda Pastan such a rewarding poet. Nothing is here for effect. There is no self-pity, but in this new book she has reached down to a deeper layer and is letting the darkness in. These poems are full of foreboding and acceptance, a wry unsentimental acceptance of hard truth. They are valuable as signposts, and in the end, as arrivals. Pastan's signature is growth."

Among her many awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She was a recipient of a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award.

From 1991 to 1995, she served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, and was among the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for twenty years. Linda Pastan lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Reviews

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

read poetry at night this week to try and keep myself sane. the first half, "the arithmetic of alternation," was not that remarkable, but god, "almost an elegy" has stunningly poignant writing about life and those we love--the kind to form tears in your eyes, the kind to make me slip out of bed into the living room to softly collect my friend's sweater, laid solitary on the bannister for days, and put it on just to sleep in his scent.

[GoldGato · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linda Pastan is new to my collection but I am certainly glad her book of melodious verse now resides on my shelf. The Poet Laureate of Maryland in the early 1990s, she writes short poems that hit the mark with an easy grace. Her topics range from the change in seasons to growing older to counting the time left to all of us.

In Daylight Savings, she notates the chill in the air telling us it is time to live inside yourselves as the birds leave, except for the crows who wrap themselves in the dark serge of their wings. If that's not Autumn fall-back, I'm not sure what is.

From Leaves, the days get colder and the willow asks: what color is regret? / no more than compost ourselves, let us grow drunk on this sherry-colored weather. That is how I feel about the last two months of the year, when the shorter days and technicolor sunsets bring back a pagan love of nature.

I simply cannot list every poem I loved from this volume, but this one hit home:

Surfeit
There are so many poems
in the world. There are so many
tea-colored peaches ripening
or rotting on the trees;
there is so much noisy
birdsong, so many trees.
I long for the God of abstinence
whose single fruit
is the sun, whose brief hymn
is the one poem necessary.

Book Season = Winter (uncrossable moats of moonlight)

[Nick Milinazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I always knew
the earth loved us
and wanted us back.

Why else would gravity tug
at our limbs with such quiet
persistence?

Why else would the soil open
its dark body, longing
to let us in?"

Pastan is one of those rare poets who is able to elevate the mundane to the magnificent. One of the reasons I love her work so much is that there feels to be this unspoken darkness about it: something to do with the tone, the meter -- an atmosphere that is wholly unrelated to the topic at hand. Nature is a frequent topic of her work, as is aging and life itself. If one were to gain anything from her poetry, it would be to LIVE: to exist in and for the moment, for as she writes: "The world wounds us / with its beauty, as if it knew / we had to leave it soon."
4.5 stars

[Donna Mork · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda passed away early in 2023. Her poetry touched on nature and on life and death and aging. It is lovely poetry.

[Arnie Kahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love almost all poetry by Linda Pastan. This is the volume of her poetry I'm reading now and I enjoy almost every poem in it. She's a very accessible poet and I recommend her, even if you don't think you like poetry.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've found a new poet that I really like.