Pastan’s many awards include the Dylan Thomas award, a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003.
In her senior year at Radcliffe College, poet Linda Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to return to poetry. Since the early 1970s, Pastan has produced quiet lyrics that focus on themes like marriage, parenting, and grief. She is interested in the anxieties that exist under the surface of everyday life. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years.
She is the author of over twelve books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006) and Traveling Light (2011).
Raised in New York City, she has lived most of her life in Potomac, Maryland.
3 AM
In the hour of the wolf
there is only
the clock
for company,
ticking
through the dark
remorseless
stations
of the night.
Love Poem
I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other
What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names–
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
Selected Works
Traveling Light: Poems (2011) Queen of a Rainy Country (2006)
The Last Uncle (2002)
Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998) – Nominated for the National Book Award
The Imperfect Paradise (1988) – Nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A Fraction of Darkness (1985) – Winner of the Maurice English Poetry Award
PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) – Nominated for the National Book Award
The Five Stages of Grief (1978)
A Perfect Circle of Sun (1971)
Links
Art Talk with Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan: Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
Linda Pastan: 2011 National Book Festival
Review: Traveling Light: Poems
