poem index

occasions
themes
forms
schools & movements

sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox

related poems

poem

About this poet

Patricia Hooper was born in Saginaw, Michigan. She received a BA and MA from the University of Michigan.

She is the author of four poetry collections, including Separate Flights (University of Tampa Press, 2016), which received the Anita Claire Sharf Award, and Other Lives (Elizabeth Street Press, 1984), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is also the author of several children’s books.

Hooper lives in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Selected Bibliography

Separate Flights (University of Tampa Press, 2016)
Aristotle’s Garden (Bluestem Press, 2003)
At the Corner of the Eye (Michigan State University Press, 1997)
Other Lives (Elizabeth Street Press, 1984)

more
fullscreen

Lens

How different things must have looked
to my mother than they did to me.
There I am in the black-and-white photo
the summer the baby died.
I’m seven, trying out my pogo stick
with the two new girls next door.
We’re laughing, and I’m shouting something
to my brother, who wants his turn.
And there’s Dad, standing near the station wagon,
staring at the grass.
She must have stood far back, under the pear tree,
focusing, trying to fit us in.

Copyright © 2017 Patricia Hooper. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2017.

Copyright © 2017 Patricia Hooper. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2017.

Patricia Hooper

Patricia Hooper is the author of four poetry collections, including Separate Flights (University of Tampa Press, 2016) and Other Lives (Elizabeth Street Press, 1984).

read more

by this poet

poem
In the Backyard
Patricia Hooper
1997
This morning a hawk plunges
straight for the squirrel at my feeder
and leaves only
its signature: blood on the snow.

All morning it circled the yard,
then dove, stunning itself
on the glass sky of my window,

and in minutes returned, braving
the thin, perilous channel
between hedgerow and house.
I was watching
poem
From a Park Bench
Patricia Hooper
2017
Under the green domes of maples
light spangles the abundant slabs of moss.
Grass won’t grow here, but something else has taken
over. When I went into the drugstore yesterday
the clerk who moved away had been replaced

by a girl who looked so much like her
I thought for a moment she’d come back to town
with her
poem
In the Clearing
Patricia Hooper
2017
After last night’s rain the woods
smell sensual—a mixture of leaves and musk.
The morels have disappeared, and soon I’ll come across
those yellow chanterelles, the kind they sell
in town at the farmers’ market. Once I saw
the Swedish woman who raises her own food
foraging for them, two blond boys
quarreling near
browse all 8 poems