Patricia Fargnoli and H. Palmer Hall

Today’s post at The Writer’s Almanac features a poem by Patricia Fargnoli, “Breaking Silence—For My Son,” which appeared in her collection titled Necessary Light and is read by Garrison Keillor (who also speaks in the audio of Flannery O’Connor on her birth date, born Mar. 25, 1925). Fargnoli’s volume had been selected by Mary Oliver for the May Swenson Poetry Award and was published by Utah State University Press in 1999.

I am pleased to note that Patricia Fargnoli appeared as one of the earliest featured poets in Valparaiso Poetry Review (Spring/Summer 2000: Volume I, Number 2). The issue also included a review of Necessary Light that had been written by H. Palmer Hall. Among the Fargnoli poems discussed in his review, Hall commented upon “Breaking Silence—For My Son” in the following excerpt:

Patricia Fargnoli has a sure way of talking about the things that matter, about love and sex and death. I love the contrast between “Landscape in Blue and Bronze” and “From Eleven Years Later” with “Breaking Silence—for My Son.” The poems are “real.” Men and women together. But the first two are almost mythic, as Fargnoli says in the second:

I want to speak with you in the round vowels
of your own language
to tell you how
I’ve named you myth and memory,
how I’ve made you a half-god.

Compare that with the scene in the car in “Breaking Silence”: “I know you want me to say I loved him / but I wanted only to belong—to anyone. / So I let it happen, / the way I let all of it happen....” The contrast is between the way we think things ought to be—love that is mythic in proportion and sex that awakens sweet memories for years with what actually happens and, yet, a true, real love that ensues, between mother and son:

And in a distant inviolate place,
as though it had nothing at all
to do with him, you were a spark
in silence catching.

Visitors are urged to examine the rest of Hall’s review, as well as poems by Patricia Fargnoli and H. Palmer Hall in that early issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Also, both writers are represented by poems in the current issue of VPR, the tenth anniversary issue of the the journal. In addition, by searching the VPR archives page, readers will find links to various works by Fargnoli and Hall in other issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review.