by Mark Thalman

In Stronger Than the Current, Mark Thalman describes the dangerous work of logging in the early 1900’s, and the hardships these Oregonians faced. Thalman then continues the historic journey with poems depicting important historical events: the drowning of Celilo Falls, the hurricane known as the Columbus Day Storm, and the Tillamook Forest Fire—powerful as a hydrogen bomb. Many of the poems reveal how residents are resilient to the weather. Helen McCready keeps a rowboat tied to her front porch because of winter floods. Another person watches goats and uses them as a barometer to predict the daily forecast. The Tillamook feast in their lodges while telling stories of the widow who cannot stop crying. These lyrical poems paint memorable landscapes, Sage grows low so wind can go where it wants—whistling through wire fences.

About the Author

Mark Thalman is the author of The Peasant Dance (Cherry Grove Collections, 2020) and Catching the Limit (Fairweather Books, 2009). His work has been widely published for four and a half decades.  His poems have appeared in the Paterson Review, The MacGuffin, Pedestal Magazine, and Valparaiso Review.  He is the editor of poetry.us.com. Thalman received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, then taught English and Creative Writing in the public schools for 35 years and is now retired. Thalman lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.

<markthalman.com>

Enjoy a video of Mark reading from the book:

Mark Thalman — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (March 2021)

Early Praise for Stronger Than the Current:

Mark Thalman sets us working in the wet woods of Oregon. We feel the bark, smell the smoke, hear the saws, and watch as “rain glistens like salmon scales/ on the tip of an eagle’s beak.”  These vignettes of the 1920s through 60s relive the beauty and passing of a wilder heritage. I was moved and haunted by “Arlington, Oregon, 1956,” where a boy imagines the Columbia rising behind John Day Dam, his mother telling him, “everything will be under water/ like the castle in your fishbowl.” And I worried, smiled and cheered for Helen McCready of “Mapleton.” Though she loses her prize tulips to the surging Siuslaw, she ties a rowboat to the porch, remains “stronger than the current” and casts for salmon. These well-crafted poems embody the simple, indestructible beauty of Oregon and its people.

—Henry Hughes, Oregon Book Award Winner

These sturdy, brief, plainspoken poems have a distinctive Made-in-Oregon stamp to them. There are logging poems and landscape poems—weather and landscape figure prominently in them—and poems of Oregon history. The Tillamook Burn and Celilo Falls . . . and “Finley’s Pasture” where “Four Belgians, ebony titans, long retired,/ graze the green pasture.” Modest, quiet poems, unassuming, but rich in substance and detail, like a good meal they stick with you.

—Clemens Starck, Oregon Book Award Winner and author of Cathedrals & Parking Lots

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Poems by Marshall Witten

with Illustrations by Elaine Franz Witten

Drawn from episodes over a long life, the poems of My Mind’s Eye survey the joys and sorrows, the affirmations and contractions of the world. The natural world becomes a mirror for human actions. And if simplicity is sometimes trampled by our greed and recklessness, knowing our true place restores at least a corner of the world.

About the Author & Artist

Marshall Witten, having practiced law for more than 50 years, has turned on his retirement to writing poetry. The natural world inspires many of his poems, as do politics, philosophy, travel, human relationships, aging, and death.

His poems have appeared in The Mountain Troubadour, published by the Poetry Society of Vermont. One of his poems was awarded honorable mention in the 2016 W.B. Yeats Society of NY international competition. In 2016 he published a chapbook, Meditations on Change.

Before retiring, Marshall spent several years as a prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, followed by more than half a century practicing in Vermont. He trained many young lawyers – imparting both a superb knowledge of substantive law and high ethical standards.

Beyond his legal career, Marshall held a variety of public service positions, many focusing on higher education. He chaired the Vermont State Colleges Board of Trustees for 13 years. He also served on the National Commission on the Responsibilities for Financing Post-Secondary Education.

As an elected public servant, Marshall served as Bennington County State’s Attorney, and later in the Vermont House of Representatives chaired the Vermont House Appropriations Committee. He was a founding director and later served as chair of the Vermont Community Foundation.

He now lives with his wife, a professional artist who has illustrated his three books. They live at the end of a road in rural Vermont, take long walks with their dog; he shovels snow when necessary, and writes because it’s always necessary.

Elaine Franz Witten majored in art at Connecticut College, New London, CT. She took her first sculpture course at Columbia University, N.Y.C. Decades later, after raising three children and working as a Registered Nurse, she returned to sculpture. Her nurse’s knowledge of anatomy informs her work. She was mentored by Jane Armstrong, Fellow N.S.S. Elaine’s career in art now spans thirty years.

Elaine is a national and international award-winning sculptor. She casts bronzes in the ancient lost-wax method. Her bronzes have been exhibited in over one hundred forty national and international exhibitions and solo shows, and museums. Her work is in public and private collections in U.S., Canada, and in the private collection of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. In 2013, Elaine became a purveyor of sculptures to the U.S. State Department. Her work was chosen for Presidential gifts by President Obama. Elaine has taught sculpture workshops in Vermont for the last sixteen years. Her work is represented by galleries in Dorset, VT, Saratoga, NY, Newport, RI, Kennebunkport, ME, and Wellington, FL. She is a past Trustee of The College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT.

Elaine paints in oil, watercolor and also renders ink drawings. Painting in a “poetic realism” style, she intuitively captures how her experience of living with nature in rural Vermont affects her and her artistic voice. Before illustrating My Mind’s Eye, Elaine produced ink illustrations for Marshall’s previous books, Reflections on Change and Remembering Harvey. Her cover drawing was inspired by the questioning mind and discerning eye of the poet.

Book Launch / Readings:

The Poetry Box LIVE – September Edition

Early Praise for My Mind’s Eye:

I’ve long thought that important poetry’s basis is human maturity, a clear-eyed awareness, which some never attain, of the human condition in its full actuality. By this measure, Marshall Witten’s My Mind’s Eye—by turns wry, deeply loving, empathetic, and soberly realistic—is a signal achievement, a monument to a long life well and attentively lived. At one point, the poet writes, “The real risks and tests of life/ are learning how to trust and love.” My Mind’s Eye is testimony to one man’s having triumphantly met such challenges, its salutary conclusion being that “We have this moment; do not let it slip/ away unnoticed; keep it in your grip.” The world feels a safer and saner place for the lessons in this stirring volume.

—Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-2015)

Marshall Witten’s My Mind’s Eye views experience through the lens of a poet’s observations. One poem states “To look is to ask…”—and that is what these poems do. He explores Vermont’s rich and contradictory seasons of intense winter and spring’s rebirth. Narratives tell gentle stories of saving salamanders who cross the road every spring to return to vernal ponds. He witnesses a fox and vixen dancing, a bear eying sheep, a goshawk hovering, and shares the humor in how the barred owl’s advertises for a mate. His poems take you on some of his life’s adventures, (at least one is somewhat perilous) from the Uffizi Gallery to Zen meditation, a loving wife, and his walks with his dog Charlie down a road between trees that threaten to be widow-makers. Several of Witten’s poems scrutinize recent political events, the “combing over” of bald truth and air-brushed lies, and the grief of climate change. Throughout, he holds on to the password to his soul.

One of my favorite poems describes the passing of time measured in the slow failure of car parts. Tucked throughout the book are Witten’s poems that tell of a lifelong friendship with Harvey to whom the book is dedicated. Resonant with the old saying to have a friend you must be a friend, Witten’s tender poems about Harvey span from college days into aging and declining capacities.

Elaine Franz Witten’s drawings illustrate My Mind’s Eye and focus the sensitivity of Witten’s poetic vision.

—Tricia Knoll, author Broadfork Farm
and How I Learned to Be White

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Poems with Ancestral Roots

by Kaja Weeks

Mouth Quill’s twenty-one poems narrate an intimate journey of universal themes—of ancestors, displacement, migration, longing, and connection. Drawn from the author’s childhood familiarity with ancient poems of her heritage, the collection’s title, “mouth quill,”  is inspired by Finno-Ugric runic verse and refers to the “singer’s magical tool.” The work unearths many such poetic concepts, creating organic metaphoric connections from the distant past to present; occasionally, the reader is invited into magical realism: becoming “the spirit of an egg, carried by the sea to Iberia” before plummeting below the Baltic Ice Lake to find the “land mother will call home.” Other poems display tragedies of history (war and displacement) and the effect of ancient world views—cataclysms, music and sacred nature—upon the author’s childhood and present in the 21^st century, completing a tightly knit, lyrical arc of identity.

About the Author

Kaja Weeks is a poet, essayist and classically trained singer whose writing contemplates music and healing as well as identity through multiple generations. She is the American born daughter of World War Two refugees from Estonia, a northern land on the Baltic Sea. Moved by the pain and beauty of its history, she also loves the alliterative sounds, mythic lore and world views in that ancient Finno-Ugric culture. Many of these motifs, found in thousands of runic verses and long preserved by oral transmission, come alive in Kaja’s creative work. Her poems, especially, weave new strands with timeless, universal themes of ancestors, displacement, migration, longing, and one’s sense of self and other.

Kaja was named a “little songbird” by the time she was five, singing hundreds of Estonian and English songs. Now she is also a clinic-based music educator in Maryland who engages young children with autism to their earliest communications with playful singing. Her ideas on development and early communicative musicality have been represented in trainings, lectures, keynote addresses and in scholarly journals in the United States and Canada.

Kaja is a graduate of New Directions, a three-year writing program of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, where she studied with renowned writers in all genres as well as specialists in depth psychology. Kaja’s literary writing has appeared in The Sugar House Review; Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, The Arts and Humanities; Under the Gum Tree; The Sandy River Review; The Potomac Review (nominee, Pushcart Prize) and elsewhere.

<lyricovertones.com>

Early Praise for Mouth Quill:

“I am a refugee’s child . . . I long for the resting sigh she was ripped from . . .” writes Kaja Weeks in her poem “Coastal Meadows” from her collection, Mouth Quill: Poems with Ancestral Roots. Weeks’s exploration of her Estonian heritage in twenty-one riveting poems swept me with her back to “those runic tunes of lost silver beads,” then forward to her mother’s escape as one of “a motley crew of the dispossessed/stitched into a patchwork of America.” Rich with birds and melody, these pages sing, but her incredible “The Dolomite Heel Print” makes sure we understand not all songs are merry. Mouth Quill, a dark crystal studded with light, amazes.

—Deirdre Callanan, author of Water~Dreaming and Fish Camp: North Jetty Tales

Estonian runic verse inspires second-generation American poet Kaja Weeks’ vivid lyric poems, beginning with the title, which refers to “the singer’s magical tool,” and aptly describes this poet’s “quill” as well, delighting with wonderfully musical and evocative language: “Mother, I see no crossroad, no rock mossed/with softest threads, no signs of sacred space.”
We travel back in time to her parents’ escape from a “world gone mad with war once more,” to forging a diasporic post-WWII life, to her late mother’s hospitalization, “Wailing not at gods, but from some crucible of the gods,” to the poet’s more recent adventures visiting her parents’ homeland. Weeks’ consideration of identity through the lens of history is visceral and heartfelt; and the inclusion of Estonian language and culture deft; as is the haunting intertwining of world history and family history; and the subject of immigration remains topical as ever, in the home of the Statue of Liberty.

—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

Equally inspired by the traumatic geo-political history of Estonia, her ancestral land, and by the alliterative musicality of the Estonian language, Kaja Weeks has woven the archetypal story of conquered nations and displaced persons into a series of lyric poems that resonate with historical importance and quiver with delicate beauty. In poem after poem, Weeks uncovers the mythic imprint of an ancient, unvanquished culture that has retained a strong sense of itself and nurtured its citizens through longstanding traditions of folk song and choral singing. Like the Estonian ancestors who came before her, Weeks sings both to celebrate and resist. “I can’t escape this terrible beauty,” she writes. “Blooming with songs/ and memory, I go.”

—Kate Daniels, author of In the Months of My Son’s Recovery and The Niobe Poems

Mouth Quill: Poems with Ancestral Roots is a touching, gorgeously written collection—such patient, meditative themes, such lushly imagined writing. “The Dolomite Heel Print,” in particular, is a breathtaking exploration of history and life and identity … a stunning piece! The collection feels like a deep dive into identity—what binds us, what tears us apart, the ways that family can become home.

—Hala Alyan, author, The Twenty-Ninth Year and Salt Houses

In Mouth Quill, a remarkably evocative collection of poems, Kaja Weeks celebrates Finno-Ugric traditions of lyricism and the reverence of nature. The ancient runic roots of these traditions rarely get the attention that they deserve, and they are well-served here. It is a pleasure to read the poems aloud, feeling the rhythms with which they are instilled. The poems are both intensely personal and resonate with a universal voice.

Ancestral Journey—Beneath Ice Sheets, the first poem of the first section, also titled Beneath Ice Sheets starts “My ancestors migrated forward in time, but I migrate backward,” and to my mind this is a key to all twenty-one poems. Weeks integrates standing in the present and looking to a past that has been handed down to her— not just reporting on what she’s been told, but having experienced the stories for herself, takes us with her.

Salme-in-Silk, in the third section, Helix, dedicated to the author’s mother, struck a particular chord with me, because I had the honor of knowing Salme in the Estonian-American community, and she was an extraordinary woman. But reading the poem, written in a mystical and lyric voice, it transcends the personal and delivers a rich visceral experience. I hope these poems are read by many and enjoyed by all who do.

—Tiina Aleman, Estonian translator
Shape of Time, poems by Doris Kareva

Using her quill to comprehend, imagine, burst free and sing, the poems of Kaja Weeks in Mouth Quill are a testament to the splendor and endurance of the human spirit. Out of the howls of war, out of curses, murmurs of stricken mothers, and cries of an ancient, trampled landscape has come a poet of such capacity that one is left gasping. From ancient runes and primeval mud of Estonia, she swallows the unendurable and transforms it into the harp song of her ancestresses. From ancestors who “lived beneath Arctic light/ where night-green and violet-blues quivered,” Weeks tells us her foremothers “cradled harps of northern spruce.” If they could hear the music of their daughter, they would weep. Read these poems and sail on sung waves of “murmur and hum.” It is an honor to hold these majestic verses in one’s hands.

—Sara Mansfield Taber, author
Born Under an Assumed Name:
The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter

Enjoy Kaja Reading from Her New Book:

Kaja Weeks — A Featured of The Poetry Box LIVE – October 2020

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by Dr. Paul T.M. Jackson

Impressions is a small collection of traditional formal poetry by Dr. Paul T.M. Jackson, inspired by quiet moments and observations—whether they occurred while cycling through Provence, rambling in Wales, trekking through Galicia, hunting for castles in Corsica, or even on a pirogue in the Amazon. Jackson enjoys sharing these moments with his readers, and hopes these carefully crafted poems helps them find their own ‘poetic eye.’

About the Author

Dr. Paul T.M. Jackson is a graduate with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classics, a master’s degree in teaching and learning, and a PhD in ancient philosophy that he passed with no corrections under examination by A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge Tim Whitmarsh and the Open University’s Dr. Carolyn Price.

He is a qualified teacher of religious education and has several years experience as a head of classics in the United Kingdom and as a teacher of  literature in France. He also has several academic publications, including “The Gods of Philodemus” in the Rosetta Journal and “The Polytheism of the Epicureans” in Walking the Worlds, and has reviewed Marchand & Verde’s Épicurisme et Scepticisme for Cambridge University Press and Ovid’s Heriodes for OCR / Bloomsbury Academic UK. He is associated with numerous professional societies and institutions and has enjoyed research stays, such as at the Fondation Hardt in Geneva.

His travel diary,  A Greek Odyssey, was published in 2018 through Wanderlust, and his translation of Alexandre Dumas’ sprawling epic Isaac Laquedem will be later on in the year. His translations of French poetry have also recently appeared in Better than Starbucks.

You can connect with Paul via social media:

Facebook: facebook.com/paultmjackson
Twitter: @paultmjackson
Instagram: @pj311078
Website: paultmjackson.com

What They’re Saying…

Paul takes us on an enriching and satisfying excursion through the European countryside—without us having to leave the couch. Brilliant.

~ Holly Hill Mangin
author of Limitless

Book Launch Celebration

June 2, 2018, CLICK HERE for details and more photos.

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Poems by Tricia Knoll

Tricia Knoll is a widely published Oregon poet. Each year she farmsits at Broadfork Farm, a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington. These poems herald her love of gardening, her compassion for the fur-covered and feather-clad beings that find the farm to be home.

In a bucolic setting next to the rushing Salmon River and below the glaciers of Mt. Adams, her record of life on the farm affirms both the humor and zest of living as well as the realization that the lives of farm animals are also witness to impermanence. At a time of environmental change, Knoll’s poetry weighs the role of the small family-owned farm against the brutal realities of the world beyond the farm. She finds gratitude and stillness in the simple gifts of sun, wind, water, and soil.

This poetry, compiled over seven years, represented for me love songs to a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington where I regularly farmsit. I wanted to release the book to poetry-lovers who admire the hard work of single-family organic farming and who have soft feelings for animals that live on farms. My daughter was married on this farm. We had plenty of photos that my husband, Darrell Salk, had taken over the years — so we incorporated some of the photos mixed in with the poetry.

—Tricia Knoll

About the Author

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet. To her, the Columbia River Gorge is one of the great wonders of the world. She loves crossing the bridge at Hood River, Oregon and heading north to Trout Lake, to Broadfork Farm. For many years, some of her best friends have been creatures with fur or more than two feet.

Her education focused on literature – degrees from Stanford University (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A.T.) She has taught high school English, edited a newspaper for school-age children, worked as the Public Relations Director at Portland’s Children Museum, and retired as the Public Information Officer at the Portland

Her first day of retirement began with walking a dog and sitting to reread Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. That re-ignited her lifelong love of writing and reading poetry. She maintains a daily haiku writing practice and sometimes calls herself an eco-poet. Her poetry appears widely in national and international journals and anthologies.

Her chapbook Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press, 2014) explores interactions between humans and wildlife in urban habitat. Her book, Ocean’s Laughter (Aldrich Press, 2016) takes its title from a line of Pablo Neruda’s: Do you not also fear the ocean’s laughter? Poetry in Ocean’s Laughter focuses on change over time in Manzanita, a small town on Oregon’s north coast.

Knoll is extremely grateful for the poet-mentors she has studied with and her poet-friends who continue to inspire and encourage her.

What They’re Saying…

At a glance, Broadfork Farm might seem a rustic homage to a simpler sort of life — and it is that — but the poems are rich with energies, convergences with and retreats from our cultural moment. Subtly, the poems ask to engage with the realities of the farm — the violences of barnyard cats and dogs, the slaughter of lambs, the impact of a long drought — and to hold these in comparison and contrast with the banal forces of history: the brutal conquests of Native lands, terror attacks at home and abroad, a hate crime against a Buddhist monk “mistaken” for a Muslim.

Knoll is a skilled poet; “To Tuck in Barnyard Creatures” is one of many poems with a rich sonic texture that is both subtle and celebratory — sometimes it feels as if we’re in the music of the farm, the songs of the roosters, the barking of the dogs, the rhythms of a different life. By the end of the book, we are asked, perhaps, not only to see and hear “life on the farm” but to see and hear our own lives a little differently. To put it more simply, like its namesake, the poetry of Broadfork Farm will “feed a few and teach caring” — and that’s a tremendous accomplishment for a book of poems.

—Tod Marshall,
Washington State Poet Laureate

For Tricia Knoll, writing poems is a way of participating in the everyday of what matters. While Broadfork Farm traces Knoll’s experiences in the daily business and busyness at the eponymous farm, her articulate and carefully observant poems simultaneously present evidence of her deep ecological concerns and her compassionate embrace of our world and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Open this book anywhere and feel the “rustles and wingbeats” of the wind on the farm, as well as Knoll’s abundant gratitude for “what watches over.”

—Andrea Hollander,
Author of Landscape with Female Figure:
New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012

To read Tricia Knoll’s Broadfork Farm is to come to a gate and find that it opens for you. These aren’t poems that stand and talk stiffly at the threshold; these are poems that welcome you into the farm and barn and pastures, poems that walk and work, that see, taste, and listen to this particular loved place. Knoll’s poems inhabit the farm as vividly as the community of humans, spotted pigs, broody chickens, goats, and dogs that live there. They roost and burrow and take root. I find myself not so much reading these poems as sticking my head into each one like a bee in a flower, eager to see what is inside. I want to stay a long time in this book’s marvelous pasture.

—Annie Lighthart,
Author of Iron String

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Poems by Lynn M. Knapp

Giving Ground pulses with traffic and teems with life, leading us through tangled streets, intertwined lives. We find a place of overgrown gardens, alleys in bloom, pheasants in flight, rabbits, stray cats, and Spanish love songs, a place where the ordinary appears in an extraordinary light. With deft narrative strokes, Giving Ground reveals a place and its people, lives balanced on the shifting ground of language and culture. Like the place, Lynn Knapp’s poems are wry, real, and poignant.

About the Author

Lynn M. Knapp is a poet, memoirist, teacher, and musician. She lives in a hundred-year-old house and walks every day in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest. The grit, grime, and unexpected beauty of the central city inspire her life and her writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss (2014), Poeming Pigeons and The Lost River Review (2015). Her work also appears online at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington.

What They’re Saying…

Giving Ground inhabits a world of concrete and blossoms, margins where cultures meet and languages strive to make sense of one another. Author Lynn Knapp displays gentle humor and the heartfelt urge to understand, to cross the border of difference in a neighborhood of alleys, music, chain link fences, and “sunlit grass the morning after.”

 – Linda Andrews,
Author of Escape of the Bird Women

Giving Ground is an invitation to be part of the neighborhood. In these narrative poems, Lynn Knapp observes the natural (flora & fauna) and human relationships happening around her. Accessible and engaging, these poems make us feel as if we are standing on the porch looking out into the small town where robins and finches forage together and a yard full of friends laugh. Walk down the path with the poet and meet the world taking place around you.

– Kelli Russell Agodon,
Author of Hourglass Museum & The Daily Poet

In Lynn Knapp’s new collection Giving Ground, myriad forms of life abound–animals, plants, flowers, and immigrants–transplants from Mexico. Vivid natural imagery becomes the backdrop for a unique set of characters who fight for survival, alternately shocking and amusing the reader. Yet there’s a rare tenderness apparent in this small-town world, a place where food, music, and language come from a foreign land but are assimilated without question, perhaps because there is never the luxury of a choice.

— Judith Skillman,
Author of Storm,
Winner of Eric Mathieu King Fund Award

In Giving Ground, Lynn Knapp explores the interstices of the controlled and the wild in her garden and her neighborhood. The nature trail near her house is bordered by railroad tracks and a highway, is populated by half-domestic rabbits, descendants of a runaway pet, and homeless campers. Knapp pulls weeds from her own garden and finds flowers blooming in an abandoned one, observes her neighbors from the vantage of windows, alleys, and the passage of time. We sense a desire to close those gaps between herself and those around her, to no longer be la gabacha in her neighborhood, but to pull her friends and neighbors–and their joys and traditions–into full citizenship in her world.

— Teri Zipf,
Author of Outside the School of Theology,
William Stafford Memorial Award in Poetry

Combining deft portraits of both past and current inhabitants with lyrical nature poems, Knapp reflects the demographic shifts that define American history. The house that a German great-grandpa built becomes a casa painted aqua blue. Now “pale pretenders” who shout “at their children in English … not the smooth, dulce syrup of Spanish” have arrived. The ground keeps giving way – and this sharp-eyed, talented poet captures that unchanging truth in a moving, finely-crafted collection.

— Carolyn Martin,
Author of The Way a Woman Knows

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