Duties of the Spirit [Perfect Paperback]

Patricia Fargnoli (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2005

Readers will discover many facets of Fargnoli's voice, but two attributes that will most impress readers are, first, the almost shimmering gladness with which Ms. Fargnoli replies to the gifts of beauty and of human love; and, second, the compassion with which she addresses whatever is beyond her own intimate surroundings.-Mary Oliver

Duties of the Spirit comprises deeply moving, lyrical and unforgettable explorations of the joys and fears that come with growing older in America.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patricia Fargnoli, the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from December 2006 to March 2009, is the author of six collections of poetry. Her newest book is Then, Something (Tupelo Press, fall 2009). 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. Her book Small Songs of Pain (Pecan Grove Press, 2003) is a collection of poems triggered by Chagalls illustrations of LaFontaines fables. In addition she has published two chapbooks: Lives of Others (Oyster River Press, 2003) and Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2003).

Fargnoli, a retired social worker, has won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and was twice a semifinalist for the Discovery / The Nation Awards. A graduate of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, the Hartford College for Women, and the University of Connecticut School of Social Work, she was also awarded an honorary BFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Arts. A member of the New Hampshire Writers Project and the Monadnock Pastoral Poets, and a Touring Artist for the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, she currently resides in Walpole, NH.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Tupelo Press (April 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932195211
• ISBN-13: 978-1932195217
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,725,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stunning collection, October 23, 2005

By 

reader (NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Duties of the Spirit (Perfect Paperback)

Pat Fargnoli's second full-length collection fills me with admiration and pleasure. These are wonderful poems, both for what they have to say and for the skill with which they are crafted. The content of the poems is often poignant as Fargnoli contemplates life's losses and sorrows and the prospect of aging and dying; yet there is also profound beauty here in the poet's praise for this earth's birds and its trees and its good people. One of my favorites, "Answers for the Scientists Who Have Wired the Heads of Zebra Finches to Study Their Dreams," displays Fargnoli's twin gifts for diction and catalog as well as her imaginative powers as she brings us into the heads of birds and lets us share their dreams. "Pistachios," another outstanding poem, begins humbly enough with a meditation on those delicious nuts and then leaps to ice cream and then to Romeo and Juliet and love and then to war, and then the poet brings it all together:

Oh, but Romeo
in the garden, in blue, and the moon over.
Oh but Juliet on the balcony.
Oh but the strong vine
that can hold a man climbing.
And pistachio ice cream,
a green you could die for.
And pistachios themselves,
the simple nourishment,
the hard welcome apple,
the fallen fruit.

In the exquisite title poem, Fargnoli recognizes that grief is one of the duties of the spirit, but she closes with a reminder that "the first is slippery joy." In the "Desire" series we are reminded of all that we might be grateful for, but there is also the brave admission that no matter how much one has, it is never enough; always, we want more. Throughout this collection there is a candid recognition of both life's beauty and its pain. "First Born" fuses together these opposites in the miracle of birth and its accompanying pain. Even the structure of Fargnoli's collection makes such a recognition, beginning with "The Invitation" and ending with "The Leave-Taking." These are poems written with a gentle hand but poems that gain force with each subsequent reading. And you will return to them, again and again.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "the first is slippery joy", March 18, 2006

By 

John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Duties of the Spirit (Perfect Paperback)

I know Pat from Garrison Keillor's inclusion of "Lightening Spreads Out Across the Water" (not in this collection) in one of his Writers' Almanacs. I was immediately drawn to her because she had no problem looking reality directly in the eye and insisting that life was still worth living. With Pat, it's not world-weariness; it's open eyed awareness, which I attribute to her experience as a psychologist and social worker. To engage, professionally, in those two fields and come out of it a poet says a lot for her strength of character and what she has to bring to the table as a fellow human being with a willingness to share. I am immediately drawn to "The Undeniable Pressure of Existence," about sighting a sick fox from her car and feeling unable to help, and "The Small Hurtling Bodies," about birds flying into buildings -- both of which, coincidentally, I've written poems about. "Duties of the Spirit" will undoubtedly be the classic here. There is an echo here of St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:13: "... therre are three things that last for ever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them is love." Taking her point of departure from a letter of Thorton Wilder's, she asserts the first is joy, the second is serenity, and "the third must be grief." All encompassing, overwhelming, waiting patiently at the end of everything, grief. In the last stanza, she sums up the poem, and the heart of her greatness as a poet and fellow traveler, "and he weighs down your shoulders, ties a rawhide necklace / hung with a stone around your neck, and hangs on and on / But the first is slippery joy." And don't you forget it.