Waiting for My Life

by Linda Pastan

Brief poems consider human mortality, vulnerability, pain, morality, concealment, and revelation

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

In 1932, Linda Pastan was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx. She graduated from Radcliffe College and received an MA from Brandeis University.

She is the author of Traveling Light (W. W. Norton & Co., 2011); Queen of a Rainy Country (2006); The Last Uncle (2002); Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998), which was nominated for the National Book Award; An Early Afterlife (l995); Heroes In Disguise (1991), The Imperfect Paradise (1988), a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (l982), which was nominated for the National Book Award; The Five Stages of Grief (l978), and A Perfect Circle of Sun (l971).

About Pastan's The Five Stages of Grief, the poet May Sarton said, "It is about all her integrity that has made Linda Pastan such a rewarding poet. Nothing is here for effect. There is no self-pity, but in this new book she has reached down to a deeper layer and is letting the darkness in. These poems are full of foreboding and acceptance, a wry unsentimental acceptance of hard truth. They are valuable as signposts, and in the end, as arrivals. Pastan's signature is growth."

Among her many awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She was a recipient of a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award.

From 1991 to 1995, she served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, and was among the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for twenty years. Linda Pastan lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Reviews

[Dianelw]

"Dreams are the only afterlife we know/ the place where the children we were rock in the arms of the children we have become." I dived into the 70s poems of Linda Pastan and listened to a voice filled with grace, helping me tap my own unsurfaced feelings. Pastan still writes today in her 80s. In her senior year at Radcliffe, she won a poetry contest, with Sylvia Plath taking second!

[tonia peckover]

(All books get 5 stars!)

I needed this book so much. Pastan explores the space of a woman's middle life with so much grace and understanding.

[sacredheart]

i have become: a poem

[Nick Milinazzo]

I am a tourist
in my own life,
gazing at the exotic shapes
of flowers
as if someone else
had planted them

In this collection, the Pastan leads us through the various stages of her life (thus far): from visions of childhood to being a mother herself, and moving into middle age. As the piece above demonstrates, she often feels as if she is "prospecting for my life" -- trapped as she is by family/domesticity. I would imagine there are many people who feel this way, especially parents, that life is passing them by, that they are merely spectators. A quiet grief pervades most of these poems. This collection is not a profound as some of her other pieces, but there are moments of astounding depth and feeling. Pastan possesses the wondrous gift of being able to achieve so much with so few words. Though these poems may be bleak, let us take pains so as not to routinely view life in such dire circumstances, but to be thankful for the gift that it is.

[Raffy Rillo]

I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.

Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like birdsong
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.

[jay]

you’d be right to judge this book by its cover. and it rocks. lovely lil poems that are wintry, patient, longing, contemplative, fixated on time and relationships and often snow. picked this up on a whim at the library but they’re making me return it and i need a copy now.

[*Weebles*]

Very interesting poems. I've never read poems like hers before, but I enjoyed them.

[Anne]

Every time I pick up a Linda Pastan book, it never disappoints. One of my favorites.

[Anna Heath]

sometimes she slays but sometimes her similes are too simple for my taste but overall an enjoyable lovely read j not my style i think

[Hannah Miller]

She knows things, and she sees into me myself

[Finley]

3.5, good but nothing remarkable or surely going to stick w me

[Carrie Cantalupo-Sharp]

Loved:
Ethics
25th Anniversary
At my window
There are poems
blizzard

ALL wonderful!

[Joseph Dante]

Poems about getting older, about marriage and children, about the writing life.

Sometimes startling, sometimes not.

[Jenny]

I feel very much like I can identify with these poems, though they are not as powerful as I sometimes want them to be. They have a passive quality--a quite, understated tone.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 P291w 1981