An Early Afterlife

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.