By RACHEL HADAS

Reviewed by REEVE LINDBERGH

Rachel Hadas is a close friend, someone I have known since the early 1970’s, and a summer neighbor in rural Vermont. She lives in a house that has belonged to her family, one generation following the other for many decades. Her new book, Pastorals, is an exquisitely written collection of brief reflections and meditations essentially but not exclusively centered on the house.

“Can one feel nostalgic for the present, especially when it’s layered so palpably over the past?” The writer asks herself this at the beginning of the book. Within the present as she lives and writes are the unseen presences of those who have visited or inhabited the same dwelling in the same place. They are not exactly ghosts but instead “the presence of an absence,” something Hadas feels at odd moments indoors or out: while going up the stairs; in the midst of picking blackberries on the hill; on the way down the dirt road to the mailbox. She likens these “seasonal phantoms” in her summer house to the ghosts in Walter De La Mere’s poem “The Listeners,” a poem that had puzzled but did not frighten her when she read it as a child. Readers of Pastorals will learn quickly that Hadas’s memory is filled with the poetry and prose of every age and nation along with her own beloved family ghosts.