”Negative capability” was initially described by 18th-century English poet John Keats as a poet’s way of living with uncertainty, or with openness to competing moods.

In two recently published volumes, two Northwest poets offer very distinctive embodiments of negative capability.

In “The Scarecrow of My Former Self,” Olympic Peninsula poet Sarah Stockton meditates on — and sometimes rages against — the impact that chronic illness has had on both her physical and emotional well-being.

“Chronic is / a distorted timeline between life and death … ” Stockton laments in one poem.

More than 50 poems comprise this collection — they are grouped into three sections.

The first part features poems that share Stockton’s quest to find answers or antidotes. She endures conventional medical procedures, but debilitating bouts of pain and fatigue also drive her to seek relief from other quarters.

In a list poem called “Studying the Vagus: Footnotes” she details the sources of (sometimes unsolicited) advice she’s received. These include “waiting room visitors, Uber drivers, that guy in line / for a pizza slice … ” in addition to the usual parade of medical practitioners, and along with a session with a tarot reader, and a sit-down with a centuries-old grimoire. (The latter is the evocative term for a book of spell-castings and incantations.)

The book’s two other sections feature an assortment of poems on “Castoffs and Connections” and “Solitude and Grace.”

The scarecrow metaphor appears not only in the title of this book but in pieces scattered throughout the collection. A scarecrow may be a grotesque figure, made up of barn-wood limbs and castoff clothes and presiding solitarily over fields gone fallow. But Stockton wants us to know that it is still visible and still vigilant — that hope springs eternal.

The other poetry volume, “Blue Atlas,” refers both to the resilient cedar species native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, and to the map of one woman’s life decisions.

Poet, teacher, and humanitarian worker Susan Rich has indeed lived a rich life. Educated at Harvard and the University of Oregon, she has taught at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and now at Highline College in Des Moines, Washington.

She’s worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Western Africa, as a staff person for Amnesty International, as an electoral supervisor in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and as a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank.

Yet for all of those accomplishments, Rich harbors a painful personal memory from decades back that will stay with her forever. It involved a star-crossed love affair, an unplanned pregnancy, and a hasty abortion.

Looking back now, as “(h)alf-mother, half-old crone,” she ponders the what-ifs in this collection of poems that are intimate, nostalgic, and sometimes devastating.

“This is not an anti-abortion poem,” she promises in one piece titled “The Abortion Question.” And it isn’t.

But that poem, and the rest, coalesce into a searingly honest narrative of choices, consequences, and — ultimately — capability.

This week’s books

This week’s books

“The Scarecrow of My Former Self” by Sarah Stockton

MoonPath Press — 92 pp — $17.99

“Blue Atlas” by Susan Rich

Red Hen Press — 112 pp — $17.95