Imperfect Paradise - Hardcover

Linda Pastan's many awards include the Maurice English Award, the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The former poet laureate of Maryland, she is the author of fourteen books of poetry―the latest of which, Insomnia, won the Towson University Prize for Literature. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Exploring the connections between the quotidian and the mythic, the "strict contract between love and grief," Pastan writes poems that are direct and passionate, yet controlled. In "Degas: 'Interieur,' " she observes that "the only light left/ is in the details . . ."and throughout, it is the accumulation of details that transform "ordinary things" into "lost objects/unexpectedly retrieved" and rendered significant. By bringing her own life experience to a rereading of The Odyssey and Genesis, she reveals "patterns that seem/ random at first . . ." but "multiply/ into beauty" when we acknowledge them as stories about ourselves and our effort to understand what it is to be human.Grace Bauer, formerly with New Orleans P.L.
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