Janet McCann Review: THEN, SOMETHING by Patricia Fargnoli

In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Spring/Summer 2010: Volume XI, Number 2) Janet McCann reviews Patricia Fargnoli’s latest collection of poetry, Then, Something.


Then, Something, Patricia Fargnoli. Tupelo Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-932195-79-8. $16.95

This book makes the reader ache beautifully. Its moving meditations on aging, loss, and sorrow, framed in striking nature imagery, both remind us of our own griefs and enhance our appreciation of the natural world. The poems make me think of Mary Oliver’s recent work, but Patricia Fargnoli’s has a more tentative, more questioning metaphysics. When all comes to an end, the poems ask, what lasts? There are exploratory forays toward answers, but no conclusive affirmation. The title is from Frost, whose “For Once, Then, Something” recounts the experience of someone looking constantly down wells and at last seeing “something” in the clarity of the water–“Truth? A pebble of quartz?” He does not know what he is seeing, but something is there, and the seeker must be satisfied with that. Even the attractive cover suggests this vision, with its photograph of a misty landscape in which an animal—a deer?—can barely be distinguished.

Pat Fargnoli is former Laureate of New Hampshire; her previous collections include Necessary Light, winner of the 1999 May Swenson Poetry Prize and published by the Utah State University Press, and Duties of the Spirit, published by Tupelo Press in 2005, and winner of the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. She also has two outstanding chapbooks, Small Sounds of Pain (Pecan Grove Press) and Lives of Others (Oyster River.) Each of her collections has a cohesiveness that maximizes its emotional power—the reader is listening to a distinct, clear voice, and this voice changes as the poet ages and her circumstances alter.

Then, Something is divided into five sections, the first of which establishes the tone with poems of an older woman, looking back at what she has valued, beautiful things and homely . . .

[Visitors are invited to read the rest of Janet McCann’s review of Then, Something and urged to examine all of the works in the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]