SJane

Well done, surely, but in my opinion a bit of a yawner.

Linda Pastan takes ordinary human relations and ordinary life and makes them, well, ordinary. Her topics are marriage and family, death, and poetry. In imagery, she likes flowers and the natural world, and bread.

The poems are tender and honest, but for me they lack surprise and linguistic interest. It's kind of sad when she goes for surprise and misses ("High Summer," and "There is a Figure in Every Landscape," for example.) I do understand their appeal to some readers, but for me they were mostly banal.

I watched part of the movie "Pina" last night about the choreographer Pina Bausch, and one of the dancers says the most memorable thing Bausch ever said to her was "you have to get crazier." I had that feeling after reading these poems - Pastan needs to take a riskier leap now and then. I understand there are all kinds of poets and not all of us drip blood like Sharon Olds, but still, I would have appreciated a little more oomph.

Still, there were some poems I enjoyed, such as the title poem, an ekphrastic piece based on a painting by Henri Rousseau.
Carnival Evening was nominated for the National Book Award in poetry in 1998. (Gerald Stern's "This Time: New and Selected Poems" won.)
Here's a good example of her work from the Academy of American Poets (poets.org):

I Married You

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity—
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.

You can read a couple of her poems on her Good Reads page too: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13146.Linda_Pastan