"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 "The world wounds us / with is beauty, as if it knew / we had to leave it soon," Linda Pastan writes in "In a Northern Country," and the poems in this new volume are full of those wounds, that beauty, 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." In her ninth book of poems (now available in paperback) Pastan has crafted a well-ordered whole, not a collection of disparate parts. Individual poems are bound to one another in a deft unraveling of imagery and subject. Where a father's silent punishment leaves the speaker coming apart "like a parcel" in one poem, the next describes "bagfuls of groceries" as the focus of a father's untrained oil paintings. She views a world from beginning to end; from the multi-faceted glass in which time melds from an Eden of lumberjacks felling "a carnage of chestnut, cedar, alder" to the 23 windows of an agoraphobic's home: "framed landscapes, containing each nuance of weather and light." Throughout, Pastan addresses both the humanity that links us and its ultimate conclusion, writing in a clean and comfortable language and imagery which belie the complexity of thought she evokes. Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review 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.' Linda Pastan (1932–2023) was the author of fifteen volumes of poems. A two-time National Book Award finalist and former poet laureate of Maryland, her many honors include the Maurice English Award and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems have been translated into eight languages.