Acclaimed poet was a master of metaphor
Award-winning writer inspired by the everyday
Linda Pastan, a poet who drew inspiration from seemingly ordinary events, died Jan. 30 at her home in Chevy Chase, Md. She was 90.
The cause was complications following cancer surgery, said her daughter, Rachel Pastan.
Pastan, who had previously lived in Potomac, served from 1991 to 1995 as Maryland’s poet laureate.
She began writing in adolescence and, by her senior year at Radcliffe College, had shown enough promise to win a collegiate poetry contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. A young Sylvia Plath placed second.
She embarked on her career relatively late, however, publishing her first poetry collection — A Perfect Circle of Sun (1971) — the year before she turned 40. Her embrace of professional writing marked the end of a decade that she spent in the throes of an affliction she described as “the perfectly polished floor syndrome.”
“I didn’t think, then, that I could be the right kind of wife and mother and keep pursuing something as important to me as poetry always has been,” Pastan told Washingtonian magazine in 1996. “I think now that I was wrong. And a young woman probably wouldn’t make that mistake today.”
Over the next half-century — her most recent book, Almost an Elegy, was published last year — Pastan produced roughly a score of poetry collections. Two of her volumes, PM/AM (1982) and Carnival Evening (1998), were finalists for the National Book Award.
In 2003, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which is accompanied by an award of $100,000 and is regarded as one of the most prestigious honours in poetry. Acclaimed for their luminescent simplicity, her works were widely anthologized and earned comparisons to the works of the 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson.
She was perhaps best known for poems that captured in short, spare lines the unnoticed emotional freight in everyday occurrences. Pastan was regarded as a master of metaphor.
Linda Olenik was born in the Bronx on May 27, 1932, and spent her later childhood in Armonk, N.Y. Her father was a surgeon and her mother a homemaker.
She was married in 1953 and received a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe, and two master’s degrees.
Survivors include her husband of 69 years, Ira Pastan of Chevy Chase, her daughter, a novelist. and two sons.