Böcker av Linda Pastan

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.

Imperfect Paradise, published in 1988, is Linda Pastan's 4th collection and was a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Poems deal with birds, the past, children, beauty, rituals, myths, the moon, vacations, aging, death, family life, and hope.

These poems chart the journeys of sleepless nights when whole lifetimes seem to pass with their stories: loves lost and gained; children and seasons in their phases; and the world beyond, both threatening and enriching life. The time before sleep acts as an invitation to reflect on the world's quieter movements-from gardens heavy after a first storm to the moon slipping into darkness in an eclipse-as well as on the subtle but relentless passage of time. Insomnia embodies Linda Pastan's graceful and iconic voice, both lucid and haunting.

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.

"Out of the screams and shouts of women demanding liberation rises the clear, true voice of Linda Pastan, who, seemingly, through love and intelligence and a sure sense of her craft, has been liberated all along." -Mona Van Duyn

"Autumnal and subdued...movingly chronicles loss, fear, the passing of time."-Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

"She is always exhilarating for a reader and very educational for a writer. She just happens to be one of the creators among current poets, alive and surprising, and deft." -William Stratford

A Fraction of Darkness is the first book to follow PM/AM: New and Selected Poems, a nominee for the 1982 American Book Award. In this new collection, Linda Pastan continues to fulfill the promise of her five earlier books.

Linda Pastan has continued to share this sense of revelation ever more broadly and deeply, from book to book, with her readers-for, as May Sarton has said, "It is above all her integrity that has made Linda Pastan such a rewarding poet."

"A keen awareness of our place in the cyclic nature of life is the theme that dominates this remarkably clear-sighted and gracefully written collection... Highly recommended." -Library Journal, on Heroes in Disguise