Alaskan poetry

Recently our neighbor David McElroy gifted us his poetry book "Forced Landing" published last year.

I was so happy to receive it! I’ve always loved his writing: it’s alive, warm, playful, and full of those detailed observations that a really attentive soul can catch.

So I started reading…

Stories from his travels around the world.

Big adventures... survival... and beauty.

Moments that brought tears in my eyes and many made me smile.

And then suddenly I came across a poem titled "Angelina" 

It’s based on a real event when my daughter was about 5 years old

The next poem "Rock" includes Clem Tillion (who started life on our island)  and Diana Tillion (Clem's wife) and Susan (our daughter's grandma in Alaska) with Angelina and David himself.

I had to pause.

And I thought:

This is Alaska for us: it's cold here most of the year but being surrounded by warm and loving souls enriches our lives and existence so much! Thank you!!

A place where a neighbor writes poems about our child.

Where our daughter somehow knew from the beginning that death is simply a return.

And Susan Ruddy remembered and retold this story to us.

David framed it so beautifully and by the way this book is written for Susan Ruddy. ❤️

Where wild life, nature, humor, and creativity live side by side.

Here is how Doug Pope, author of "The Way to Gaamaak Cove", describes David’s work:

"David McElroy sees a poem everywhere. In Forced Landing, his crisp lines take us with emotional force around the world in poems worth reading again and again. In Laos, he laments unexploded bombs that “…killed and wait to kill / Pathet Lao and now their grandchildren / farmers hoeing rice.” At hospice care, where his wife “is dying two feet away,” he is “…alone as a man can be / whose wife of skin and bone is sleeping / finally…” McElroy touches back down in Alaska with the title poem, where an aircraft loses power off Kodiak…and he engages in an epic struggle to survive: “I am somehow out the back door / and swimming up the blue-green gloom. / And then there is air, air everywhere. / Trees bending in a breeze over on shore...”

The book has amazing photographs of owls by Bob Waldrop.

If you would like to touch different corners of your soul through the  creativity of our local Alaskan poet here is link to the book

Some stories feel too alive not to share. ✨

I feel a lot of gratitude for living...

Thanks a lot to all the people around!!!