Resort

By Patricia Hampl

Book Overview

When Patricia Hampl's first book of poems, Woman Before an Aquarium, appeared in 1978, Choice called it "a generous . . . first collection," and Virginia Quarterly Review characterized her work as "a poetry of accumulated details, strikingly presented." Now, after the success of her brilliant prose memoir, A Romantic Education, which won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, Hampl has taken her poetry a step further in her new collection, Resort. The classical themes of beauty and love, loss and memory have always formed the core of Hampl's work. Here, they are treated in a series of shorter poems and then gathered powerfully into the long title poem of the collection. Set in a small, tumbledown cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior, Resort follows the season of summer as Hampl explores a period of solitude following a loss, employing as a touchstone the image of the wild rose as it blooms and withers. In essence a poem about healing oneself through paying attention to the world outside, Resort has been called by poet Sandra McPherson "major, richly entangled, ebullient . . . all of a sudden my favorite long poem."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887483550
• ISBN13: 9780887483554
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 9.1"