Heroes In Disguise

From the vantage point of middle age, Linda Pastan in her eighth collection summons up the past and imagines the future, touching upon themes of family, childhood, time and loss, and the beauty of nature. "Let the eye enlarge with all it beholds," she says in the opening poem; she becomes a "seer", delivering her poems, as the "Washington Post" says, "with delicacy of rhyme and honest precision".