An Early Afterlife

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.'