Pastan was born in New York, New York, on May 27, 1932, the only child of Jacob and Bess Schwartz Olenik. A melancholy poem about her parents, "Something about the Trees," records Pastan's childlike faith that her father would "always be the surgeon," her mother, "the perfect surgeon's wife," and that "they both would live forever." She began writing, she says, around age ten or eleven: "As a very lonely only child, reading and writing was my way of being part of the world." The world of her poems is a peopled world, inhabited by parents, grandparents, husband, children, and lovers. It is also inhabited by mythic figures—Eve, Adam, and Noah, Odysseus, Penelope, Circe, and Achilles. These people, mythic and real, are often connected by Pastan's ability to tell stories of loss and change. They are also connected through metaphors from ordinary times and common places, images...