Ethics | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Ethics Critical Overview

Beyond reviews of her books, there is relatively little criticism of Pastan's poetry, despite the fact that she has been widely and steadily published for thirty years, and has received numerous awards. In his review of PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1983), critic Peter Stitt of The Georgia Review may have suggested the simplest reason for this phenomenon: "Pastan does not write about ideas nor about things."

Pastan writes about people—their bodies and their minds—and because of the nature of her cen-teredness, she offers less for critics to talk about; these poems are more readily accessible to the reader. Pastan is "accessible" because she writes about people going about their "dailiness," a subject that is presumably uninteresting to the average critic. Stitt's comment (and his review in general) may ultimately have more to say about the perceived difference between "reader" and "critic" than it does about the substance of...
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