Pastan, a much honored poet (Ruth Lily Prize 2003, National Book Award nominee twice, Bread Loaf Conference faculty for more than 20 years)  wrote these poems when she was 82 years old, and they reflect a lifetime of exploring the meaning beneath the surface of the everyday.  She’s one of my favorite poets, showing up regularly in the Poetry Tree on the Charles, but I was a bit disappointed in this volume. There were too many ‘moony’ poems featuring the moon, and it was only in the last section of the volume that I found what I was looking for.  These poems focused primarily on lost friends, artists (Hopper, Van Gogh), and aging/death, and there were some memorable ones.  Two of them were about poets from earlier in her life, one a friend and one a teacher.  I loved them.

And Evening: For Roland Flint  “Here you are, alive/on the page/years after your death,/ though that’s an immorality/ you might have traded/for one cold beer tonight/or the honeyed embrace/of a girl just half imagined/even then./  Immorality/and its bastard brother/fame—you wanted both/  even as you scorned them,/those evenings/we talked for hours/  about the purgatory/of neglect; that year/when your fledgling books/  were shaped  not like coffins/ but like coffers/ of Keatsian gold.  

Remembering Stafford on his Centennial:  “When you said there was no such thing/ as writer’s block if your standards/ were low enough, everyone laughed/ and I laughed too, but you meant it, didn’t you?/  The point is to follow the winding path/of words wherever it wants to take you, step/by step, ignoring the boulders, the barbed wire/ fences, the rutted ditches choked with ragweed./  How complicated such simplicities are./ Forget the destination, you taught us,/forget the applause; what matters is the journey./And started one yourself, each morning.”

Pastan is good, really good, and reading this book even though I found a bit spotty, helped me figure out how to better read poets.  Read a whole volume; find the individual poems you love; copy them into your review so you find the wonderful, subtle, often hidden touches and meanings; read them again.