NH Poetry: Then, Something

Alexandria Peary recommends Then, Something by Patricia Fargnoli (Tupelo Press, 2009)

This book, written when Patricia Farngoli was in her seventies and I’d guess during her service as state poet laureate, is crisscrossed with large and small migrations, cross-overs of the liminal. Snow and soul, a winter solo of a thawing brook and a survivor’s scarred body, the isolation of a senior living facility, private empathy with animals and insects, their aspiration and their fates: the speaker of these poems pauses on a threshold. It’s as though she wants to set down the seed pod of a question near the other—moles, mollusks, waves, moths, moose—and quickly turn back to the lit rooms of the living or human. Then, Something evokes New Hampshire in winter isolation, a walk across a frozen lake under a mountain bedecked in blizzard. In “Then,” Patricia Fargnoli observes from a place “where memory was hidden among the grasses” on one side and on the forest side, “the door of their branches closed behind us.”

Alexandria Peary serves as New Hampshire State Poet Laureate and is a 2020 recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship in support of her mindful writing workshops for New Hampshire’s opioid epidemic survivors and the establishment of the North Country Young Writers Festival (May 2021). She is the author of seven books, including The Water Draft, Control Bird Alt Delete, and Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing. #NHPoetLaureate 

This post is part of our celebration of National Poetry Month 2021 for which I asked New Hampshire poets to recommend books of poetry by Granite State poets. These titles are generally available from local booksellers and may be held in public libraries as well.