Traveling Light: Poems

The poems in Traveling Light trace our journey through the years in language that makes the ordinary landscapes we pass through new again.

"Our lives have minds of their own," Linda Pastan says in her title poem, "Traveling Light," and in this collection she continues to chronicle her journey through that life with its pleasures and problems, its unexpected detours. The concerns of these poems are many: the ambivalences of love and family, the surprises---indeed the shocks---that come with aging, art and how it can change us.

The Gettysburg Review wrote, "Some critics point to Emily Dickinson when citing Pastan's lapidary style and metaphysical wit, a comparison that does justice to either poet when Pastan is at her best." And the Boston Globe said, "Pastan is a poet of wholeness---a sane poet, who expresses a full range of the possibilities and potencies of the human, feminine voice."

In another poem from this new book Pastan tells us: "It is the ordinary that comes to save you." It is the transformation of the ordinary into something strange and luminous that is the hallmark of her remarkable work.

Linda Pastan is the author of twelve previous works of poetry. She has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award and was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2003. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.