Aristotle's Garden

Aristotle's Gardenby Patricia Hooper

Winner of the 2003 Bluestem Poetry Award

"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.