Linda Pastan's Selected Poems are written almost entirely in a mode that lends itself to expressions of limitation and low spirits: short poems, short lines, mild sub-romantic diction…. Many of them teeter on the brink of sentimentality (and there is an obvious danger of sameness about the routine). Yet somehow they do draw away from it: a well-controlled, resolving image will often work successfully against the current pulling a poem down towards bathos. Now in her forties, she has only been writing during the 1970s, and it's encouraging to see that towards the end of this volume she is getting more strength and resonance into these modestly structured pieces.