An Early Afterlife

By Linda Pastan

Book Overview

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.'

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393037274
• ISBN13: 9780393037272
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

a masterful collection

Linda Pastan is, as you may know, a contemporary American writer living in a suburb of Washington DC. She writes out of her own educated, middle-class experience, but she transcends that to an astonishing degree. Using often the dailinesses of our lives to find gripping metaphors and illustrations of the stark beauty of life, she illuminates my world in ways for which I am very grateful. Her humor is also wonderful -- gentle, ironic. Her knack for inverting her poems, for twisting what she has created into a new shape and vision is remarkable.