Traveling Light (review)

Throughout her career, Linda Pastan's powerful and insightful poems have observed the world around her. Pastan's most recent book, Traveling Light, continues to meditate on the themes of memory and aging, change and growth, grief and loss, emphasizing the ephemerality of the world we live in. A prize-winning poet and author of thirteen volumes of poetry, the inquisitive Pastan continues to transform everyday activities—walking through a garden, eating dinner, riding a turbulent plane—into the stuff of poetry.

In an age when poets are under increasing pressure to write experimental and disjunctive lyrics, it's pleasing to read a poet who covers a diversity of human experiences in the most concrete terms. Traveling Light (which at seventy-seven pages is small enough to be read in one sitting) is elegantly humble, achieving lyricism through the skillful handling of plain speech rather than flashy poetic gestures. Pastan has a keen eye and avoids taking any word for granted. She commits herself deeply and fully to a kind of simplicity often found in poets like Mary Oliver and William Stafford. Her poetry gropes toward self-illumination, taking us with her so that we, her readers, are never in the same place at the end of a poem as we are at the beginning.

In "March," the speaker looks back at her childhood and laments the relationship she had with her father, stating that "there were so many things unspoken between us." The speaker realizes that she showed her father less love than he deserved:

This is the month for remembering, the lightso new it illuminates what we hardly knew we saw:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .my father wanting something from meI didn't know to give.

The words "I didn't know" signal the reason for the speaker's failure to recognize her father's love and attention: she was too young to know and did not have the insight she does now as an adult. In this poem, Pastan creates brief memories, interrupted by the pace of daily life. The poem asks us to contemplate whether our lives are as "mixed-up" as the weather in March, with "one foot / in winter the other in spring, doing a windy / two-step from past to future."

Poems such as the pantoum "Years After the Garden" explore the biblical story of Adam and Eve, repeating over and over again: "What was God thinking when he made the apple? / Did he do it only for the story?" This refrain prompts the metaphysical questions about our existence, purpose, and meaning—answers to which remain elusive even if one has obtained the "seeds of knowledge." Other poems like "The Maypole," "Acorns," and "The moon" make us listen to nature that sways, knocks, and draws silence around us. "Burglary" continues the focus on the engagingly conventional theme of remembering (and what's more conventional than remembering a parent?). The speaker remembers her mother's silver being stolen, forcing the family to "eat with [their] hands." This memory prompts the speaker to recall another moment, one that occurred before the theft. She remembers:

my mother holding a shining ladlein her hand,

serving the brothto children who will forget

to polish her silver, forget evento lock the house.

One can read this poem as a reflection of the speaker's guilt, her sense of being somehow responsible for the burglary because she forgot to "lock the house." "Lilacs," on the other hand, illustrates how intelligent and tender and lyrical Pastan can be. In this poem, the act of "traveling north" brings about a bittersweet recollection for the speaker, whose musings involve both memory and loss. The consciousness of this loss also informs "Purple," where Pastan describes not only the cyclical nature of purple crocuses that "erupt from earth" but also "at the first chime / of spring" the speaker's "brittle bones" and "unwieldy heart" "rises / (despite itself)." By the end of the poem, the speaker comes away with an understanding of renewal. Pastan's message is clear: faced with the choice of destruction or survival, we...