Patricia Fargnoli, the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from December 2006 to March 2009, is the author of six collections of poetry. Her fifth collection, Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2005) won Jane Kenyon Literary Book Award for an Outstanding Book of Poetry and was a semifinalist for the Glasgow Prize. Her first book, Necessary Light (Utah State University Press, 1999) was awarded the 1999 May Swenson Poetry Award, judged by Mary Oliver. (Author photo by John Hession)
“Patricia Fargnoli’s poems are vividly and gratefully aware of the comforts and assurances of the natural world; she does not miss a stitch of beauty, neither does she avoid the darker aspects of . . . human awareness of our continual aging, to which she gives sharp and poignant attention. I have been her champion since her first book Necessary Light was published, and I continue to be so.”
—Mary Oliver
“I love . . . reading a sister or brother poet and being struck by some beauty or truth, or both, and leaning forward and asking myself, How did she or he do that? This is the experience Then, Something gives me, poem after poem. Fargnoli’s ability to see and connect with the world around her, in its motions and stillness, its darkness and brightness, is uncanny. These haunting poems give comfort even when they probe the inevitabilities of suffering, aging, death. Perhaps it is because Fargnoli loves life, no matter what. Perhaps it is because the poems are simply beautiful.”
—Alicia Ostriker
Tupelo Press
