A POET OF WHOLENESS

THIRTY YEARS OF LINDA PASTAN'S WORK: FROM THE SLIGHT TO THE EXTRAORDINARY

Author: By Liz Rosenberg

Date: SUNDAY, August 30, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

This is not to say there are not a few small, more minor poems in among the brave beauties -- perhaps these have tricked us into underestimating Pastan over the years. But they are vastly outweighed by poems of great depth and delicacy. In the poem, ``Pain'':

. . . you are pulled down by the weight

of your own hair.

And if your life should disappear ahead of you

you would not run after it.

Or on love: ``loving, being loved / the panicking / of the pulse.'' Pastan understands understatement, juxtaposition, and contraction. Her poems can come like gasps, or move beautifully among open spaces, as in ``Consolations'':

the dog whines

and in the changeling trees

late bees mumble, vague

as voices

barely heard

from the next room . . .

You touch me----

another language. Our griefs

are almost one;

we swing them between us

like the child lent us awhile

who holds one hand of yours

and one of mine

hurrying us home

as streetlights

start to flower

down the dark stem

of evening.
Alas, she is schooled in the language of grief and loss, but her work strikes every possible tone: comical (``In the English, where I spent my girlhood, / I used to think chillblains were a kind of biscuit''), coiled (``But underground, / their banner still furled, / whole armies of flowers wait''), gaudy (``the pale flowers / of the shamrock fold / their fragile wings''), sexy (``desire and need / become the same animal / in the silken / dark'')), and often, full of wisdom, by which I mean many wisdoms -- there is no fixity here.

I had even forgotten how married love

is a territory more mysterious

the more it is explored, like one of those terrains

you read about, a garden in the desert

where you stoop to drink, never knowing

if your mouth will fill with water or sand.

Much has been made of Pastan's ``domesticity,'' but I find that her attention to homely detail resembles the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, unmasking the seeming simplicity of complex things. There is nothing contrained or domestic about Pastan's subjects. She writes about everything from science to history, memory, poetics, geology, art, dreams, myths.

One review does not allow space to show Pastan's narrative abilities, but she is a wonderfully inventive storyteller. Her mind moves elegantly through a poem, feeling and thought together:

Russia . . . I thought, Russia . . . a country

my grandfather thought he had escaped from

but which he wore always, like the heavy overcoat

in the story by Gogol, or the overcoat he wrapped me in

one night when the grown-ups kept on talking,

and I shivered and yawned in an ecstasy

or boredom that made my childhood

seem a vast continent I could only escape from

hidden in a coat, in steerage, and at great risk.
Pastan is a Jewish poet, an urban poet who both remembers the subways and buses of the Bronx, and has lived in rural Maryland long enough to observe ``the garbled / secrets / of the waterfall / about to be stunned / on rock'' or ``these blossoms, sprinkled / like salt through the dark woods.'' She is also in fundamental ways a female poet, writing about women in all their strengths, weaknesses, guises, and disguises:

And I have been Niobe,

all mother, all tears,

but myself somewhere hidden

in the essential stone.

You say I write

like a man

and expect me

to smile.
Her phrases often have an oracular, aphoristic quality, perception sharpened to a point: ``How much of memory / is imagination? And if loss / is an absence, why does it grow / so heavy?'' Or, on childbirth: ``But this work / this forcing / of one life from another / is something I signed for / at a moment when I would have signed anything.'' It is impossible to choose from the many pleasures of ``Carnival Evening'': dogeared reviewer's copy looks like origami. The selection of poems is abundant and strong, showing a poet at the height of her powers. The difficulty here is to take pieces from poems that work as wholes, like hundreds of suns and moons. And Pastan is a poet of wholeness -- a sane poet, who expresses a full range of the possibilities and potencies of the human, feminine voice. In the collection's title poem -- based on a painting by Henri Rousseau:

the two small figures

at the bottom of this picture glow

bravely in their carnival clothes,

as if the whole darkening world

were dimming its lights for a party.
Here in one image is the poet's hopefulness, her anxiety, her palette and celebration. One may love and remember small moments, but the accomplishment of ``Carnival Evening'' is large, large. We can only be grateful for Pastan's sharp eye, her tenderness.