Pacific Walkers is Nance Van Winckel's second collection chosen for the highly regarded Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (as was No Starling). In the first section, also called "Pacific Walkers," she gives voice to anonymous people whose stark obituaries--sex, approximate age, clothes, distinguishing marks--appear in the records of the Spokane County medical examiner's office. Here is "John Doe #130969," an adult male, approximately 60 years old, found along the railroad tracks, a tattoo of a name on his right forearm, unreadable:
"Because he'd brought nothing to unpack.
Because the house of this field
was so foreign, it embraced its resident."
At the opposite end of the spectrum, a female infant, only three or four months old, is found near a sewage treatment plant: "She wouldn't say if/ there'd been a beep, a siren,/ or a whisper."
Old photographs provide the source material for many of the poems in the second section. In "Stole," Van Winckel takes inspiration from a wedding photo of a young woman in 1911: "I lean past the question mark near her name/ and get the woodsmoke taste of her first kiss." Here, too, are poems about working as a newspaper reporter, being taken for a mannequin and, in "No Sign of My Passing," eating an apple, alone, on a "believed-to-be secret beach":
"And slice by slice, I ate an apple unsure
at the last about the center,
the polishing off even the stem
and the small black seeds."
Worlds, people, things--quietly, carefully observed. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher