"With unforced subtlety
and the power of restraint, Aristotle's Garden illuminates
the beauty and latent mysteries of the natural world, revelatory
in and of itself but also as a figure, elegantly tended and shaped,
for the seasons of human life. Beneath this book's deceptively
calm surfaces something like wisdom stirs, breaking repeatedly
into epiphany."
—B.H. Fairchild,
Final Judge 2003
"Here is a poet who
savors the small changes in the everyday word—gardens, haircuts,
birds—and sees them as a way into the knowledge of her own
mortality. Gardeners especially will enjoy this collection, but
all readers will appreciate the directness and clarity of Hooper's
poetry."
—Nancy Willard
"There is such elegance
in Patricia Hooper's poems—a cinematic, frame by frame,
examination of the known and secret worlds of the garden and yard,
the local and larger geographies, the self and humanity. She follows
the ancient dicta: to see and say, to read and invent. Aristotle's
Garden is the prize."
—Thomas Lynch
Patricia Hooper is
the author of two previous collections of poetry, Other Lives,
which was awarded the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry
Society of America, and At the Corner of the Eye (Michigan
State University Press). She is also the author of a State Street
Press chapbook, The Flowering Trees, and four children's
books. Her poems have appeared in many magazines including The
Atlantic Monthly , Poetry, The American Scholar,
Ploughshares , The New Criterion, and The Hudson
Review. A graduate of the University of Michigan, where she
earned B.A. and M.A. degrees, she has been the recipient of five
Hopwood Awards, the Poetry Society of America's Bernice W. Ames
Award, and a Writer's Community Residency Award from the National
Writer's Voice. She lives in southeastern Michigan.
