Necessary Light
Necessary Light
Patricia Fargnoli
$12.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-87421-284-6
Add to cart

Necessary Light

Volume 3 of the Swenson Poetry Award

Patricia Fargnoli

foreword by Mary Oliver

"Readers will discover many facets of Fargnoli's voice... but I think the two attributes that will most impress readers are, first, the almost shimmering gladness with which Ms. Fargnoli replies to the gifts of beauty and of human love; and, second, the compassion with which she addresses whatever is beyond her own intimate surroundings. Whatever it costs her, whatever it takes, there seems to be for Ms. Fargnoli only one world and only one way to live within it: with a ferocity of attention, care, and response." —Mary Oliver

"In Necessary Light, Pat Fargnoli proves that joy is not only possible, but that the highest joy is arrived at only after bearing the weight of experience through some terrifying valleys. Ms. Fargnoli's heartening, disturbing, mature first book is rich with two things poetry can never have enough of: energy and wonder." —Brendan Galvin

Transcribed from the original Nahuatl manuscript (written circa 1600) and translated into English for the first time, this epic chronicle tells the preconquest history of the Tlaxcalteca, who migrated into central Mexico from the northern frontier of the Toltec empire at its fall. By the time of Cortés's arrival in the sixteenth century, the Tlaxcalteca were the main rivals to the Mexica, or Aztecs, as they are commonly known. One of the few peoples of central Mexico not ruled from the Mexica capital city of Tenochtitlan, the Tlaxcalteca resided in the next valley to the east and became Cortés's powerful allies. They were also speakers of the Nahuatl language who followed a sophisticated agriculturally based urban way of life and documented their history in traditional —painted books —created by specially trained scribes. Thus, their chronicle, Anónimo
Mexicano, offers a rare alternative perspective on the history of central Mexico, which has been dominated in the popular imagination by the stories of the Mexica.

Winner of the 1999 May Swenson Poetry Award, Patricia Fargnoli has also received the Robert Frost Literary Award, a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, has been in residences many times at the Dorset Writers Colony, and has received several other awards for her poetry. Her work has been published in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Prairie
Schooner, and many other literary journals.