PM/AM: New and Selected Poems

by Linda Pastan

“In her work there is a return to the role of the poet as it served the human race for centuries: to fuel our thinking, show us our world in new ways, and to get us to feel more intensely.” The rightness of this summary of Linda Pastan’s poetic career―in the San Francisco Review of Books ―will be immediately clear to readers of her new volume, PM/AM . Instructions to the Reader : Come. Suspend willingly or not your disbelief and with empty pockets enter the room of the story. Warm your fingers at this candle which is only the stub of a dream and at any time may flicker or go out. Here fire consumes itself with paper and pencil for kindling; here a unicorn waits in the corner its musical horn ready. When I tell you this story is pure fact you will want to leave the room. Stay awhile.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

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

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pastan is clever, and witty, and sometimes a little sneaky. Her poems are - on the surface - about the everyday, but there is always a monster hiding in the walls, or under the table, ready to open its eyes. These poems are about life. They are about the beginning of life and the ending of life, and the love and lust and loss that happens in between. She pulls the wilderness in close, and she sees life within the lifeless objects that clutter our lives.

A sample:

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.


At the Gynecologists’s

The body so carefully
contrived for pain,
wakens from the dream of health
again and again
to hands impersonal as wax
and instruments that pry
into the closed chapters of flesh.
See me here, my naked legs
caught in these metal stirrups,
galloping toward death
with flowers of ether in my hair.


Journey's End

How hard we try to reach death safely,
luggage intact, each child accounted for,
the wounds of passage quickly bandaged up.
We treat the years like stops along the way
of a long flight from the catastrophe
we move to, thinking: home free all at last.
Wave, wave your hanky towards journey's end;
avert your eyes from windows grimed with twilight
where landscapes rush by, terrible and lovely.


A Dangerous Time

November is a dangerous time for trees;
November is a dangerous time.
The leaves darken,
the sun goes on and off
beyond strange clouds,
a wolf is at the door.
Upstairs the children toss through dreams,
hearing the wind in the keyholes of sleep,
hearing the sirens circle the house like coyotes.
I have tucked them in with the wolf's own story,
how it grew from a cub, devoured the bride,
blew down the house of straw--
how this was natural.
Now my eldest walks the freezing hills
crying wolf, wolf.
He is a prophet, he has warned before
that the stars will rise like gooseflesh,
and a wolf is at the door.


You Are Odysseus

You are Odysseus
returning home each evening
tentative, a little angry.
And I who thought to be
one of the Sirens (cast up
on strewn sheets
at dawn)
hide my song
under my tongue—
merely Penelope after all.
Meanwhile the old wars
go on, their dim music
can be heard even at night.
You leave each morning,
soon our son will follow.
Only my weaving is real.

[Deborah Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best of these poems is in the last section "Waiting for My Life." The poet's voice and use of language is consistent throughout the book. But I often felt that I was being asked to enter into her way of looking at the world, when I'd have preferred something a bit more open-ended. At times I wanted to take out a blue pencil and start crossing out lines from the end of a poem, until I could edit out the conclusion. Or, to put it another way, the poet is too concerned with closure. Nevertheless, I will probably read "Waiting for My Life."

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appreciated the dailiness of her poems- motherhood, marriage, desire, faith, being a woman and a poet.
Some striking lines -
“I choose again a life // of plants and vegetables” from Crimes (new poems)
“Babies should grow in fields / common as beets or turnips / they should be picked and held / root end up, soil spilling / from between their toes— / and how much easier it would be later, / returning them to earth.” From Notes from the Delivery Room (a perfect circle of sun)

[Carrie Cantalupo-Sharp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really brilliantly beautiful poetry.
My favorite wow poem is: I am learning to abandon the world.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of Pastan's poems, at least in this volume, are about mundane life, but from time to time she truly does find something incredibly insightful to say. And who says poetry can't be about mundane things too?

My favorites were We Come to Silence, Dido's Farewell, Waiting for my Life, and What We Want.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Linda Pastan's poetry from the 1980s blew me away. Almost every poem touched me. Most about daily lives of women; feelings, motherhood, death of parents etc. READ IT!!!