SFP
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul. --Joyce Carol Oates View my complete profile
http://pagesturned.blogspot.com/2005/02/linda-pastan.html
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Linda Pastan Linda Pastan http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/749
I should be shot, yes, taken outside and shot. I bought Linda Pastan's Carnival Evening based on L.R.'s recommendation more than a year ago, I'm sure, a recommendation I trusted, yet I still allowed the book to sit never opened on the shelf until yesterday. There is no explanation for my own colossal stupidity, because this is my kind of poetry book: an ample number of poems based on mythological personalities and events, the writing and reading life, being female, and individual goodies such as a poem about Emily Dickinson, visiting Anne Frank's house, free will, and my own personal favorite, one about a safecracker (a nitrogylcerin reference!) that turns into a poem about sex. This isn't the best poem in the collection, but certainly the most typical for me to post here: Realms of Gold 1. RECESS I used to think the cover of a book was a door I could pull shut after me, that I was as safe between pages as between the clean sheets of my bed at home. The children in those books were not like me. They had the shine of bravery or luck, and their stories had endings. But when Miss Colton called "Yoo Hoo, Third Grade," and I had to come running, the book suddenly slippery under my arm, sometimes those children ran with me. 2. THE QUARREL "What are you doing," he asks, and I turn a page, then another. "Are you still reading?" And I pile page after page, like sandbags, between us. I'm going to tear that book out of your hands, he says, but I don't hear him, the sound of pages turning is like a far train approaching, and Anna has just entered the station. 3. FINAL INSTRUCTIONS When the time comes, make my grave with clean sheets and a comforter of flowers. If you come to call, rest against the stone which will lean like a bookend over my head. Make yourself at home there. Read to me! --Linda Pastan, Carnival Evening
Posted by SFP at 8:16 AM
2 comments:
Anonymous said...
hi,i was just wondering if you knew where the title "Realms of Gold" came fom? It's a school assignment so it would be helpful if maybe you could post it up if you did know the answer... Thanks
2:36 PM
sfp said...
John Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."
3:08 PM
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