Patricia Hampl

Resort Patricia Hampl

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.?