Ocean's Laughter

All precious places on this planet should have an advocate such as Tricia Knoll. Here the rich motions of the Oregon coast come to life within and around the watchful mind of a twenty-five year resident. The mixed particulars of human presence, the mysteries of environmental fragility and strength, awaken and abide in these calmly visionary, crucial poems.
—Poet Naomi Shihab Nye
When it comes to books that catch the light, the misty visage, and all the moods of the Oregon Coast just right, I think of Don Berry’s Trask, Ursula LeGuin’s Sea Road, and Brian Doyle’s Mink River. Now joining them comes The Ocean’s Laughter. I’ll never be able to peer down over Manzanita again, or even think of village and surf and beach life on this enchanted shore, without Tricia Knoll’s poems flooding welcomely to mind. Elegant poems of wit and whimsy, of finding and losing and what remains, these lines seem to have come ashore with the blue-green glass and the sanderlings, fully formed and ready to be found, instead of the hard work they really were. As the poet writes, “the fog smells of fir needles,” and so do these words themselves. Through Ms. Knoll’s living and watching, and finally her writing, The Ocean’s Laughter becomes our own.
—Robert Michael Pyle, author of Evolution of the Genus Iris: Poems, and Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land
Human life happens somewhere, and Tricia Knoll has given eloquent and realistic insight into a place called Manzanita, a small town on the Oregon Coast. Only a resident could interpret so deeply the birds, the sea-creatures of every kind, the wilderness of the shoreline, the great mystery of the moving zone between ocean and land. People, both local and visiting, intimate and stranger, inhabit this book like a town. The poet herself is present in every line, showing us around. To read this book is to be immersed in daily life, seen for what it is: full of shadow and light, gulls eating gulls, the abandoned toy shovel claimed by the water, the ever-present reminder of Fukushima tsunami debris washed ashore, and the sunset’s “luxury of liquid flame.” In the end we are as sad as the poet to leave a place we have come to know so well.
—Bill Siverly, author of Steptoe Butte