“Overtures” is a new collection from Tillamook County poet and novelist Lana Hechtman Ayers.

Upon reaching a certain age, one realizes that there are fewer years ahead than behind. That’s bound to prompt reflection, possibly regrets and perhaps recalibration.

Lana Hechtman Ayers deals with all of this in her new poetry collection, “Overtures.” A Tillamook County poet (and longtime publisher of other Pacific Northwest poets’ work via MoonPath Press), Ayers considers her muses, mentors and inspirations in this gathering of nearly four score poems.

“No Lid on Limitless” is the ebullient opening piece. Delivered in four stanzas, this poem briefly considers our limitations as Earth-dependent humans, but then, just as economically, specifies some of the vast possibilities that remain open to us.

The following poem, “Always,” continues in that vein: there are always “clouds reeling across vast movie screens of sky” or “the silver candlelight of stars whose dark wax never melts … ” There are always, in autumn, “bare branches conducting / thousands of wind-whetted orchestras.”

This week’s book

“Overtures” by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Kelsay Books — 126 pp — $23

The natural world can offer solace, and Ayers captures those moments in exquisite turns of phrase. But that isn’t to say that life is always a picnic.

This poet has journeyed around the sun enough times to know that while there are moments in time that can feel electric, there also are periods when it seems more like the batteries have stopped working.

Past traumas inform some of the pieces in this volume — the poems “After Nine Months,” “The Moon Has No Face” and “If Only” make no bones about the fraught childhood and the “arid light” the poet endured.

“I want to say it has been milk and cookies ever since,” Ayers writes, but her tone is wry.

There are the mega-problems we see on the nightly news – wars, famine, violence. In a handful of poems, Ayers rails against “our weapons of indifference and harm” and charges power-brokers and poets alike to direct their imaginations toward solving these human-caused blights.

She also writes about a wide range of challenges closer to her own lived experience — from losing loved ones to the annoyance of bot-generated e-mails that promise to drive more traffic to her website, or the calamity caused by a global pandemic.

All of us who weathered the pandemic will find something to relate to in “Permissions During Quarantine (and Other Times)” — Ayers ties up this list poem of rejiggered aphorisms with a generous conclusion.

Paying attention and making connections are important features of this poet’s work. She considers an array of other bards throughout history and up to the present day – Basho, William Stafford, Joy Harjo and more – engaging with their ideas and approaches even as she makes observations from her vantage point.

Notions of posterity flit through these pages, but if Ayers honors what the past has taught her, she also advocates for enjoying the gifts of the present. Her poem titled “Never Give Up” focuses on the pleasures of the everyday.

Another poem, “Wherever You Go,” suggests that there are blessings to be found there.

“Overtures” is an open invitation to empathy.