'Spring Meditation' is by Kevin Miller.

This week’s books

‘Terra Firma’ by Michael Magee

MoonPath Press – 150 pp – $20

‘Spring Meditation’ by Kevin Miller

MoonPath Press – 64 pp – $11

Take one Tillamook publisher dedicated to the proposition that poetry delivers value to our world, and add two seasoned Tacoma, Washington, poets who have been practicing their craft for more than fourscore years between them.

MoonPath Press spotlights the work of poets Michael Magee and Kevin Miller in two new collections of poetry.

Magee, a retired English teacher, has been writing poetry for over half a century. “Terra Firma” includes poems inspired by his travels around the American West, across Europe, and even further afield. Whether domestic or foreign, Magee’s sojourns inspire reflections on history and the passage of time. 

He devotes poems to the petrified ginkgo forests along the Columbia River, and to a pub that lays claim to being the oldest in England. He also communes with the ghosts of bards and storytellers past.

In one poem, he swoons to a 1958 recording of Sarah Vaughan singing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and in another, he ushers in a new year to the soundtrack of Marianne Faithfull.

In his piece titled “Road to a Grecian Urn,” Magee wanders through the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, politely rebuffing a solicitation from “a man with puppy-dog eyes” before finding the final resting place of Keats. That’s where our poet, too, sits down and bides his time for a while, “the solace of a poet’s life.”

Magee even honors the passing of language itself. He is not the first to lament “Words Removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary 12 Years Ago,” but his poem of that name keeps alive for a while longer a handful of words that someone, in what one can only surmise must have been an algorithm-governed decision, deemed irrelevant to today’s children.

And so today, the poet keens, “the bluebell is languishing / and the dandelion gone to seed.” But loss of language isn’t afflicting only the human race. In another poem, Magee notes that “Coffee has taken away the songbirds / where music held sway in the trees…”

Magee repeatedly intertwines the temporal with the sacred, the transient with the enduring. These poems are a testament to a life fully witnessed.

MoonPath Press also has brought out Miller’s “Spring Meditation.” The photo on this book’s cover hints at the theme of this collection, which is the poet’s dad, just a kid in 1928, who wears a baseball mitt and earnestly scowls into the sun, ready for the catch.

These poems encapsulate in myriad ways the idea that life and baseball are poetry. Miller writes about practicing pitches against the garage door, rained-out games, and away games where “It’s eighty and so muggy the air is butter.” He reminisces about going to McNeil Island to play games against the penitentiary team.

And he writes poems about his dad, his son and his grandsons, a line driven through the generations, using a national pastime as a way to spend time and spin memories with family and friends.