Resort

by 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.”

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.