Ocean's Laughter - Softcover

Knoll, Tricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0692541853 ISBN 13: 9780692541852

Publisher: Aldrich Press, 2015

Synopsis

All precious places on this planet should have an advocate such as Tricia Knoll. Here the rich motions of the Oregon coast come to life within and around the watchful mind of a twenty-five year resident. The mixed particulars of human presence, the mysteries of environmental fragility and strength, awaken and abide in these calmly visionary, crucial poems.
—Poet Naomi Shihab Nye
When it comes to books that catch the light, the misty visage, and all the moods of the Oregon Coast just right, I think of Don Berry’s Trask, Ursula LeGuin’s Sea Road, and Brian Doyle’s Mink River. Now joining them comes The Ocean’s Laughter. I’ll never be able to peer down over Manzanita again, or even think of village and surf and beach life on this enchanted shore, without Tricia Knoll’s poems flooding welcomely to mind. Elegant poems of wit and whimsy, of finding and losing and what remains, these lines seem to have come ashore with the blue-green glass and the sanderlings, fully formed and ready to be found, instead of the hard work they really were. As the poet writes, “the fog smells of fir needles,” and so do these words themselves. Through Ms. Knoll’s living and watching, and finally her writing, The Ocean’s Laughter becomes our own.
—Robert Michael Pyle, author of Evolution of the Genus Iris: Poems, and Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land
Human life happens somewhere, and Tricia Knoll has given eloquent and realistic insight into a place called Manzanita, a small town on the Oregon Coast. Only a resident could interpret so deeply the birds, the sea-creatures of every kind, the wilderness of the shoreline, the great mystery of the moving zone between ocean and land. People, both local and visiting, intimate and stranger, inhabit this book like a town. The poet herself is present in every line, showing us around. To read this book is to be immersed in daily life, seen for what it is: full of shadow and light, gulls eating gulls, the abandoned toy shovel claimed by the water, the ever-present reminder of Fukushima tsunami debris washed ashore, and the sunset’s “luxury of liquid flame.” In the end we are as sad as the poet to leave a place we have come to know so well.
—Bill Siverly, author of Steptoe Butte

About this title

About the Author

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet. For twenty-five years she owned a vacation rental in Manzanita, Oregon. Ocean’s Laughter records years of witness to environmental change on the coast and her love of this small town with a wide outlook on the Pacific Ocean.
She moved to the West Coast in 1972. For eight years she taught high school English in Portland. Then she served as the Public Relations Director of the Portland Children’s Museum. In 2007 she retired as the Public Information Director of the Portland Water Bureau. For the month of October 2005, she lived in New Orleans as part of a Portland Water Bureau response to help restore water service following Hurricane Katrina. The Portland crews lived in tents on a New Orleans Water and Sewer Board water tank site that had not flooded. She is FEMA-trained in emergency response communications. She picked up debris in Manzanita that floated onto the shore from the tsunami following the Fukishima earthquake in 2011.
Knoll’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press, 2014) focuses on the interactions of humans and wildlife in urban habitat.
She is an avid gardener of vegetables, roses and plants native to the Pacific Northwest. Knoll writes haiku, dances, runs and hula hoops as daily practices. She has run hundreds of miles on Manzanita’s beach.
Knoll has degrees in literature from Stanford University (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A.T.) She is grateful to the many poets with whom she has studied and from whom she received encouragement.

About this edition

• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0692541853
• ISBN 13: 9780692541852
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112