PORT ANGELES — Alice Derry laid her heart between the pages of her book Tremolo.
“For Bruce and Lisel,” she writes near the front, dedicating the poems that follow to her husband of 27 years and to her 25-year-old daughter, now a teacher in New York City.
Derry herself taught for close to three decades at Peninsula College, and Tremolo has poetry about life with students here — and about their struggles.
She misses those students, now that she’s been retired three years, but Derry knew she had to leave school to write this book.
She’ll read from Tremolo, named for the musical effect that sounds like trembling, this Friday in the Raymond Carver Room at the Port Angeles Library.
Admission is free to the 7 p.m. reading at the library at 2210 S. Peabody St.
This book was a long time coming, so “we’re going to have a little celebration, with a cake,” Derry promised.
“So if you don’t like poetry,” she added with a smile, “you can eat cake.”
Tremolo is an intensely personal journey through events that are fairly universal: a daughter’s goodbye to her parents, a mother letting go of her daughter.
The poems will be familiar to lovers of the outdoors, too, as they take the reader on camping trips to Shi Shi Beach and Strawberry Point, and to Lake Ozette and the fields of Dungeness.
The book is also the fruit of Derry’s friendships, made and developed over decades.
She moved to Port Angeles in 1980; soon after that, she became friends with writers Charlotte Warren and Tess Gallagher.
Warren has been her writing partner since 1981, so the women rendezvous often, bring their poems and go through them together.
Gallagher also has been an enthusiastic supporter, while her Irish companion, artist Josie Gray, painted Tremolo’s cover art.
His image of land and sky is titled “Cónaí Amuigh,” Gaelic for “dwelling outside.”
Tremolo is Derry’s fourth full collection of poetry. More details on her other books are at www.AliceDerry.com.
Red Hen Press, a respected poetry publisher, accepted the Tremolo manuscript in 2008, but then the recession hit independent presses hard.
A delay in the book’s release let Derry revisit her poems, thinking through the collection at least twice more, before Red Hen finally published the book Sept. 1.
“Tremolo is a tour de force of vibratory power,” Gallagher writes on the back cover.
Derry “is unstintingly frank about our failures with each other while witnessing the tenderness, the give and take that let us cleave to each other.”
Tremolo’s poems talk about “the trembling of our lives,” Derry said, “and how we have to face that and get steady from it.”
She’s inspired by “The Waking,” a poem in which Theodore Roethke writes, “This shaking keeps me steady.”
And there’s another line she appreciates, a line about life’s rougher spots.
“I learn,” Roethke wrote, “by going where I have to go.”
If life is trial, community can be relief, Derry feels. She’ll give about 15 readings from Tremolo in Washington, Oregon and California, and looks forward to talking with her listeners.
“People ask really interesting questions,” she said.
“Even though poetry seems like a solitary activity, in the sharing of it, it’s a community act.”
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.ww
