Ocean’s Laughter (Poems)

By Tricia Knoll. Aldrich Press: Hemet, California, 2016.

Ocean’s Laughter combines lyric and eco-poetry to look at change over time in a small town on the northern Oregon coast. The poems pay homage to the raw beauty of the Pacific Ocean — and also record Knoll’s 25-year history of witnessing to dwindling shorebird populations and loss of habitat, increasing “non-wilderness” uses of the six-mile beachfront in Manzanita including driving on the beach and burning driftwood that stabilizes dunes for bonfires. Each Fourth of July dozens of communities annually shoot fireworks over the ocean which is marine mammal habitat including a pod of gray whales that stay in this section of Oregon coast.