The Valparaiso Poetry Review has posted 2 excellent and in-depth reviews of Duties of the Spirit by New Hampshire Poet Laureate Patricia Fargnoli. They appeared in two different issues of VPR and each is well worth the few minutes it tales to read them. Edward Byrne’s review reads in part… “…[A]gain and again, readers are repeatedly impressed by Fargnoli’s refreshing images of nature – the surrounding landscape and its animal inhabitants, the borders between wilderness and civilization, or the long course of coastline that separates the land-locked speakers in the poems from the vast openness of the ocean before them. Readers are particularly rewarded with poems revealing instances and experiences where contrasting elements of different habitats meet or the distinct environments come into conflict, as well as when an individual resident of one world trespasses upon another.”

To say that Michael Milligan of the Valparaiso Poetry Review likes Pat Fargnoli’s Duties of the Spirit is to commit a vast understatement. His review reads, in part: “… Fargnoli so adeptly welcomes us into her world that we find ourselves deeply engaged at the outset, and identifying utterly with the poet. Her sense of place is impeccable – describing, indeed re-creating the physical and emotional landscapes through which she travels, Fargnoli fastens us securely to our own. Concurrently, all countries become the same country, all vistas the same vista – the boundaries between reader and poet dissolve and for a time we inhabit the same realms.”

Latest in the long line of praise comes a review from North American Review: Echoing Thornton Wilder who says “one of the duties of the spirit is joy, and another is serenity,” Fargnoli adds “the third must be grief.” These poems are an ineluctable mix of these three feelings, always with lovely and delicate imagery and language; the poet and the speaker find consolation in nature, beauty in the conflicts of city, resiliency and hope in the midst of aging—radiant revelations of a life well-lived. Ever “the existence of laughter which persists like a miracle.”

The praise just keeps coming. The most recent Duties of the Spirit review says… “These poems are written with serene grace… Fargnoli has found a striking, poetic voice that is above all deeply honest.”