Finding a new poet is like finding a new wildflower out in the woods. You don't see its name in the flower books, and nobody you tell believes in its odd color or the way its leaves grow in splayed rows down the whole length of the page. In fact the very page smells of spilled red wine and the mustiness of the sea on a foggy day—the odor of truth and of lying. And the words are so familiar, so strangely new, words you almost wrote yourself, if only in your dreams there had been a pencil or a pen or even a paintbrush, if only there had been a flower.
—Linda Pastan
Rights & Access
from Heroes In Disguise, 1991
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY
Copyright 1991 by Linda Pastan.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. from Heroes In Disguise. Copyright 1991 by Linda Pastan.
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Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan (1932- ) is the author of over a dozen poetry collections, including Insomnia: Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, 2015).