Brink of the World

Entrant for the Pulitzer Prize in Letters, 2009, Best New American Poet, 2007: Pastore owes all he has, and has ever had, to a saving engagement with his art. What I particularly admire is the gamble he takes, and wins, with those classic stylized poems. In less accomplished hands they might have been distractingly archaic, but here, defused by the beautifully plain and heartfelt thanks for everything into which they flow, they connect back to the great tradition from which Pastore has drawn strength not just artistically but personally, one feels throughout one of the more impressively and, I might say, spectacularly, composed first poetry collections in contemporary American poetry.