Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998 by Linda Pastan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Linda Pastan is such a versatile poet. At times, her poetry is uplifting, encouraging, and simply lovely. But it can also be so sad that it breaks your heart.

There is no denying that her poetry is beautiful. I read that she revises her poems one hundred times, and I believe it, because these poems constantly astonish us in both imagery and in language. One example is “Proclamation at a Birth,” which is the first poem of hers that I ever came across, the poem that led me to buy this book. I first read this poem in my daily email from the Writer’s Almanac, and it stood out because of the way it captures a parent's joy as a new life comes into the world.

Let every tree
burst into blossom
whatever the season.
Let the snow melt
mild as milk
and the new rain wash
the gutters clean
of last year’s
prophecies.
Let the guns sweep out
their chambers
and the criminals doze
dreaming themselves
back to infancy.
Let the sailors throw
their crisp white caps
as high as they can
which like so many doves
will return to the ark
with lilacs.
Let the frogs turn
into princes,
the princes to frogs.
Let the madrigals,
let the musical croakings
begin.

In some ways, this poem is typical of her work. It’s deceptively simple, and it involves the changes that life brings us. But it also stands out from much of her other work in that it focuses on the beginning of a life, not on the end of one.

Pastan's poetry is dominated by the thought that life will come to an end. As it is in Keats’s late poems, the steady approach of death is always in the background of her poetry, even if not mentioned outright. This gives Pastan’s poems a quiet poignancy and a deep sense of loss. One way that Pastan expresses this quiet grief is through nature, as her poem “Autumn” demonstrates:

I want to mention
summer ending
without meaning the death
of somebody loved

or even the death
of the trees.
Today in the market
I heard a mother say

Look at the pumpkins,
it’s finally autumn!
And the child didn’t think
of the death of her mother

which is due before her own
but tasted the sound
of the words on her clumsy tongue:
pumpkin; autumn.

Let the eye enlarge
with all it beholds.
I want to celebrate
color, how one red leaf

flickers like a match
held to a dry branch,
and the whole world goes up
in orange and gold.

This use of nature as a symbol of change and impending loss gives Pastan’s work subtlety and power. Another way Pastan achieves these qualities is through her allusions. She makes herself various characters from mythology and Scripture, including Penelope and, most of all, Eve. Her many references to Eve and to Eden are fascinating, and they reflect Pastan’s meditations on many aspects of our human experience, including fate versus free will, relationships between men and women, and the problem of evil in our world. One example of the poet as Eve is a lovely sonnet entitled “Seasonal” from her sonnet sequence “The Imperfect Paradise.”

Which season is the loveliest of all?
Without a pause you smile and answer spring,
Thinking of Eden long before the fall.
I see green shrouds enclosing everything
And choose instead the chaos of the snow
Before God separated dark from light.
I hear the particles of matter blow
Through wintry landscapes on a wintry night.
You find the world a warm and charming place,
My Adam, you name everything in sight.
I find a garden of conspicuous waste –
The apple’s flesh is cold and hard and white.
Still, at your touch my house warms to the eaves
As autumn torches all the fragile leaves.

This mixture of beauty and sadness permeates her poems. And one thing I like about this volume in particular is that it captures thirty years of Pastan’s work, so it includes her thoughts on all stages of her life. There are poems about her girlhood, poems about her courtship and marriage, poems about becoming a mother and the complexities of parent-child relationships, poems about aging and losing parents, and, near the end of the book, the beautiful poem “Sometimes,” written from her perspective as a grandmother:

Sometimes

from the periphery
of the family
where I sit watching
my children and
my children’s children
in all their bright cacophony,

I seem to leave
my body--
plump effigy
of a woman, upright
on a chair--
and as I float
willingly away

toward the chill
silence of my own future,
their voices break
into the syllables
of strangers,
to whom
with this real hand
I wave goodbye.

Poems like this cause me to love this book. And yet as I finish it, I grieve that for Pastan, these fleeting moments of joy are all she has. As she looks ahead to the end, there is nothing more.

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