In this book, Tillamook poet C.L. Downing recaps years of family strain and broken trust, and a career spent helping others.

Two volumes of poetry released by MoonPath Press this year seem to be in conversation with each other: they address the random moments of security or betrayal that occur in one’s younger years and imprint for a lifetime.

But they also explore the revelations of old age.

The Northwest coast provides a frequent backdrop to those experiences — and nature increasingly provides solace.

Portland poet Carey Taylor’s latest collection of poetry, “Some Aid to Navigation,” reflects on her unusual upbringing. Her dad’s Coast Guard career kept them on the move — and meant that she grew up at three different lighthouse installations as a child.

Tide pools and sea wrack along the beach served as her early playground, while her father’s work included going out on rescue missions to shipwrecked boats. The sea’s sneaker waves taught Taylor something about life’s unpredictability. The later flotsam of her parents’ failed marriage was tricky to navigate.

“The dog huddles / in the furnace room,” Taylor writes. “The apples won’t / become pies.”

But in retrospect, the break-up seemed almost foretold.

After reconciling with some of the soul-tattering incidents of her early life, the poet turns her attention to the concerns that occupy her now — everything from climate change and solastalgia, to being told by her own daughter to communicate via text, but “don’t take it / personally.”

Taylor considers “the crooked line” her family has taken across generations, and reminds herself that beauty can be found in mending, akin to the Japanese practice of kintsugi.

Just a few years younger than Taylor, Tillamook poet C.L. Downing also experienced the fracturing of her family.

In her new book of poems, “To Walk the North Direction,” Downing adopts a wryer tone, however, when, years after the fact, it comes to assessing her parents: “I wished for Mike and Carol Brady — / I got Peter Pan and Pol Pot.”

Wow.

Like Taylor, Downing’s early years were marred by strained family relationships and sexual violation by folks who were expected to be trustworthy.

She escaped as soon as she could by opting into the harsh world of military service, followed by tough stints then finding work in a lumber mill, and then in a prison. Working with boat children and street kids, trying to help them find a path toward overcoming trauma.

In writing about all of these experiences, Downing’s poems are taut but devastating, as “(m)emory dirt kicks up like a rooster tail … ” and her dreams are haunted by “vigil keepers” who “sprinkle the night / with toxic reflection.”

But then, one day, something life-changing happens.

She writes about this in a poem called “Eleventh Hour”:

“Retirement wrapped its arms around me like an old friend, / sweetly scolding, ‘Where’ve you been?’”

And Downing turns toward this new life, “layers of pain sloughing off, oxygen returning to the blood … ”

“The worldview grafted onto a person by trauma,” she writes, “cannot withstand the luminosity.”

This week’s books

“Some Aid to Navigation” by Carey Taylor

MoonPath Press — 102 pp — $19.99

“To Walk the North Direction” by C.L. Downing

MoonPath Press — 112 pp — $19.99