Insomnia by Linda Pastan (review)

The poems of Linda Pastan's "Counting Sheep" section of her 2015 book Insomnia seem to glow with a milky white iridescence on the page. They are extremely lyrical, delicate and celestially referential. The pastoral nature of her previous work appears to have been rarified and distilled to its crystalline essence in these poems; that is, into a few fine lines of carefully crafted neo-Romantic verse. Her poem "First Snow" is written in rhymed tercets and is beautifully realized. Here "On hills, on frozen lakes / all definition fades / before the rush of flakes // until, bereft of light, / the moon gives up/ her sovereign claim to white."

A deep classism pervades these opening poems. There is, as well, an allusion to Biblical allegory with a nod to Robert Frost as in the poem, "The Gardener." Here we have a winter scene in which a gardener is rescuing his fallen hollies from the snow and shoveling to free his imprisoned azaleas; in short, a gardener who finds "in destruction/ the very reason to carry on;" the poem takes an allegorical religious turn when it compares the gardener to God: "who would look at the ruins / of Eden and tell the hovering angel // to put down his sword, / there was work to be done."

"In The Orchard" gives us another example of Pastan's Frostian viewpoint. As in Frost, the pastoral becomes an occasion for wise and mysterious contemplation. Pastan begins with the question: "Why are these old, gnarled trees / so beautiful, while I am merely / old and gnarled?" She ends in the last stanza with: "I shall bite into an apple / and swallow the seeds. / I shall come back as a tree." This crosses the Adam and Eve story with hints of Joyce Kilmer or Blake's "Songs of Innocence."

"Elegy" is a fantastic poem. The contemplation of a dogwood tree, a "relic" for the days when dog-woods flourished "—creamy lace in April, / spilled milk in May—brings the remarkable statement that closes the poem: "When I took for granted / that the world would remain // as it was, and I / would remain with it." Again, Frost holds influence as well as James Wright and his Deep Image Poetry with its always surprising epiphany at the poem's end.

Section 2, "Ship's Clock," of Pastan's book moves us into a series of ars poeticas or meditations on the nature of poetry and the poet. Pastan writes in the title poem "Ship's Clock": "I string words together / wherever I am—/ in planes, in waiting rooms, // forcing the actual to sink / and disappear / beneath the bright / and shimmering surface / of the half-imagined."

And in "The Poets" she lays out in metaphor the comparison of the farmer to the work of the poet. How the poet plants "in strict rows" "coaxing each nebulous seed / to grow." Pastan admits that "Under the sheen of success / or the long shadow of failure, // what they labor for remains / the same: their own muscular // beanstalk rocketing skyward / from a single bean."

In "And Evening: For Roland Flint" and "Remembering Stafford On His Centennial" Pastan has written two hearty poems about the poet and the poet's ego. Pastan chides the deceased Roland Flint that though he remains alive on the page and therefore immortal, he might "have traded [it] / for one cold beer tonight // or the honeyed embrace / of a girl just half imagined / even then." Pastan goes on to discuss immortality and its "bastard brother / fame" and how both goals, though scorned by the poet Flint when he was alive, were also very much desired to lift Flint out of "the purgatory / of neglect." From Stafford, Pastan, takes the lesson to forget the "destination" and forget the "applause;" and to remember that "what matters is the journey."

In Pastan's "On The Road to Pompeii" there is a wonderful conversational erudition and tongue-and-cheek humor suggestive of a James Merrill or a William Matthews poem. High and low culture are referenced and the odd ironies of the poem are very funny indeed.

This...