Almost an Elegy
New and Later Selected Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“[Pastan] is a poet of a hundred small delights, celebrations, responses, satisfactions, pleasures.” —Hudson Review
A moving and incandescent volume from a poet celebrated for her “unfailing mastery of her medium” (New York Times Book Review).
In poems of graceful lyricism and penetrating observation, award-winning poet Linda Pastan sheds new light on the complexities of ordinary life and the rising tide of mortality. Drawing from Pastan’s five most recent volumes and including over thirty new poems, Almost an Elegy reflects on beauty, old age, and the probability of loss.
With signature precision and quiet power, selections from The Last Uncle (2002) and Queen of a Rainy Country (2006) explore childhood, love, landscape, and the many pleasures of the imagination. Poems from Insomnia (2015) and Traveling Light (2011) chime with similar themes of aging, memory, and language. The new poems offer a profound portrait of a poet contemplating her life and the endurance of art, amidst the fleeting beauty of nature and the everyday losses that accompany old age. In “The Collected Poems,” Pastan writes, “For years I wrestled / with syllables, with silence.” Now, after a long and celebrated career, the poet rests “in a hammock of words, waiting / for the sun to rise again / over the horizon of the page.”
Whether in a lush evocation of an impressionist painting or a wry and wistful ode to a car key, Pastan finds lucid meaning in the passage of time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing from Pastan's five most recent collections and including more than 30 new poems, this luminous volume shows a master craftsperson reveling and reflecting on the world's beauties and pains, finding deep meaning at every turn. A new poem, "Truce," revisits the subject of her father, "This is for my surgeon father at last/ whom I've desecrated in poem after poem/ for punishing me with silence, for caring too much/ about the exact degree of love and respect/ my adolescent self let trickle down to him." Another new poem, "Instruction," is one of Pastan's finest across her oeuvre, displaying her superb control of the couplet form as it poignantly addresses the subject of grief: "You must rock your pain in your arms/ until it's asleep, then leave it// in a darkened room and tiptoe out." An earlier poem, "Women on the Shore" (from 2002's The Last Uncle), wisely advises: "If death is everywhere we look,/ at least let's marry it to beauty." Pastan has taken that charge seriously throughout her impressive career, proving herself to be a poet of unusual generosity, humanity, and skill. These are poems worth savoring and revisiting.
