The Ocean Calling Me Back

by Phyllis Mannan

In The Ocean Calling Me Back, poet Phyllis Mannan shares her love of the ocean and longing for the North Oregon Coast after leaving her family’s beach home of fifty years.

Early Praise

Phyllis Mannan knows the Pacific Ocean, knows its beaches, its rock formations, its dunes, its tides. She knows the ocean’s moods, its ability to soothe, its gentle voice that can suddenly change without warning from calm to cruel. To her, living on the Oregon Coast feels, in a word, like home. And then, we learn in these articulate and moving poems, Mannan has to leave it all behind. Forced by circumstance and age, she must etch out a completely different life in a city. How will she manage this, we wonder. From poem to poem, we travel with her, feel with her “the silence bearing down.” The Ocean Calling Me Back is a book of articulate and ardent love poems for a place that is more than a place. It is a stunning ode to the power of the ocean and to the nature of belonging. I know of no other book of poems that speak so vividly of such complexities.

—Andrea Hollander, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here

A casual reader of Phyllis Mannan’s intimate poems about the Oregon Coast might label them nature poems. But please don’t read them casually. These poems are a reckoning.

Powerful and poignant, they are elegies not only for a place the poet knows she must leave, but for a life she must also let go. For fifty years the ocean has been Mannan’s companion. It has been, for her, a source of solace and strength. What will life be like without it? Who will she become? With not one syllable of sentimentality, these poems both praise the sea and mourn its absence in her new city after the necessary move to be closer to family and medical care.

Readers of a certain age will recognize the dilemma of this necessity. Readers of any age will appreciate Mannan’s love for her life on the Oregon Coast and be moved by her ability to express it through these poems.

—Emily Ransdell, author of One Finch Singing

About the Author

Phyllis Mannan moved with her husband and daughter to the Portland, Oregon area in 2025 after living on the North Oregon Coast full time for 18 years. She has published a memoir, Torn Fish: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and Their Shared Humanity, and a poetry chapbook, Bitterbrush (Finishing Line Press). She has received a Literary Arts Fellowship in poetry, and her poems have appeared in Cirque, Cloudbank, North Coast Squid, Rain Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, and elsewhere. A poem is forthcoming in the anthology Campfire Stories: The Oregon Coast (Mountaineers Books) in 2027.

Before retiring, Phyllis taught high school English and served as a substitute teacher. She advocated for children and adults with developmental disabilities for many years. In Manzanita, she volunteered in the Hoffman Center for the Arts Writing Program. She finds pleasure in reading, writing, and gardening and values her faith, nature, and the arts.

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