Featured Poet: Patricia Fargnoli, Walpole, NH

Patricia Fargnoli, the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 2006-2009, has published three award-winning books of poetry and three chapbooks.  Her latest book, Then, Something, Tupelo Press, 2009, won the ForeWord Magazine Silver Poetry Book Award, The Shelia Mooton Book Award, an Honorable Mention in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards and was a finalist for the 2011 New Hampshire Literary Awards.  A Macdowell Fellow, she's published over 300 poems in anthologies and literary journals such as: Ploughshares, Mid-American Review,  Massachusetts Review et. al.  She's a retired psychotherapist.

Pat writes:

“Should the Fox Come Again to My Cabin in the Snow”  was one of those extremely rare poems that came to me suddenly and almost whole though, no doubt, it had been “cooking” in my sub-conscious for years.  The fox is my totem animal and has been since two foxes did once “run down the hill” at Bretton Woods as I sat outside the cabin I was visiting in the early morning, and they lay down under a stone ledge nearby.  I've written about those “real” foxes before.  But by the time I wrote this poem, the fox had assumed a mythic presence in my mind.  I suppose he is a muse-like figure, though I'm not sure I want to nail him down that much.  He most certainly is a mysterious messenger from the natural and/or spiritual world.


Should the Fox Come Again to My Cabin in the Snow

Then, the winter will have fallen all in white

and the hill will be rising to the north,

the night also rising and leaving,

dawn light just coming in, the fire out.


Down the hill running will come that flame

among the dancing skeletons of the ash trees.

I will leave the door open for him.

(first published in The Alaska Quarterly)

For more information about Pat Fargnoli visit:

• http://www.patriciafargnoli.com/
• http://www.tupelopress.org/authors/pfargnoli
• http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=patricia+fargnoli&tag=googhydr-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=1154089061&ref=pd_sl_28cwyembpl_e