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Merle P. Martin is a former Alaskan who maintains strong ties with the Last Frontier. A Professor Emeritus in business technology and management information systems at Sacramento State University, he’s also taught in Thailand, the Russian Far East, and at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. And before all that he served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force and directed the Alaska Air National Guard.

These days he’s enjoying his retirement in the company of his wife in Spokane Valley, Wash. And as befits a man who has been so active, he’s not sitting still. This can be evidenced by the fact that he has just published his first two volumes of poetry. “The Haunting: Poetic Images of Alaska” focuses primarily on the 49th State, while “Colors of the Soul: A Poetic Quest” ranges more broadly. Both have much to offer their readers.

Martin has seen his share of tragedy, and shares some of it here. In “Walk in the Shoes” he confronts the guilt of passing by a homeless panhandler, a feeling made even more acute when he recognizes that “13 percent of homeless have mental health issues / I’m truly sorry for that. My son has wandered San Francisco for / 15 years. / When we try to coax him off the street, he disappears, to be alone / with his voices.” As the poem progresses, Martin wrestles with his own inner voices that try, but fail, to convince him that he should help the stranger.

A worse blow was the death of his second wife, Patricia, who succumbed to cancer after a far too brief marriage. In a nightmarish account of her deathbed scene Martin writes, “A plastic tube slithers into her face hissing. / Another pumps bloody semen through / violated veins. / A shiny vomit pan awaits its tithe. / Cluttered mourners cast visitations.”

Fortunately, dark moments like these are only sparsely found in these books, but they offer a testament to the strength and humor that Martin has been able to find in life despite his losses, and that he conveys well on the page. He dedicates both these books to his third wife, Dotty, and many of the poems are clearly written in her honor. In one of the many passages that will bring a smile to his readers, he writes, “You are still that emerald princess who kissed / this everyday frog, changing me to this blissful now.”

Martin is anything but an “everyday frog.” But he does have a great eye for the details of the everyday world. For instance, in “Ode to a Dandelion” he writes of that accursed weed found everywhere in America, “Surviving piling snows, / twenty-five below, / lethal sprays, lawnmower decapitations, / Once there, forever. / Cockroach with petals.” In other words, you have to admire the hearty infesters.

Martin similarly celebrates the common folk of Eastern Washington in the poem “Inland,” where he sees “proudly thrusting stomachs,” “swollen, toil-gnarled fingers,” and “Unshaven men in NASCAR caps, / woman tee shirts, sequined jeans.” This is “Faith-stomping, flag-flapping country,” he tells us. Adding, “If you don’t like us, don’t try to change us. / Go back where you came from.”

Yet while he sees the good in such people, Martin won’t fall for their worst excesses. In “Honor,” an ode to faith over fundamentalism, he declares “I would honor the deist or agnostic / who sees in the most miserable / seeds of the majestic / instead of the zealot / whose majesty is chiseled belief.” Ironically, Martin sees more of the spirit in his unwashed fellow citizens of rural America than do the evangelists who routinely shake them down for a tithe and then leave them to their dead-end lives.

Like any poet with two good eyes, Martin spends a fair bit of time contemplating nature, particularly in “The Haunting” with its images of Alaska. Some of the finest lines he conjures concern the brief passage of fall in the far north, which he describes thusly: “Autumn Alaska / suicide of colors / shriek of suddenness / a thin thread of silk / barely binding together / dissimilar seasons.” I’ve heard Alaska’s fall described in many ways, but “suicide of colors” may be the best.

These poems traverse the streets of Anchorage and Juneau in the 1960s, and head down to San Francisco, then abroad to Thailand and Russia. Martin has traveled widely, and he carries pieces of the places he’s been wherever he goes. The ghosts of Vietnam surface, as does the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake. And he expresses his hopes brought about by the election of Barack Obama, but his politics are muted by a firm grip on reality.

Martin is frequently at his best, however, when he settles into his role as an old man. “Symphony of the Absurd” reads like a movie camera panning across the scene at a retirement home with all its attendant indignities and tragicomic pathos. In another poem, set in a park, a fellow retiree tells him “I’ve thought lately about not coming anymore… but my bench might miss me.” And in “Mirror Cinquain” he simply writes “Wrinkling / hair shrinking, grey / with dandruff, paunch, eyelids / sinking. Shaving’s become a lot / less fun.”

Merle Martin is one of our elders, and we’d do well to listen to him. His observations have been shaped, but not hardened, by tragedy. There is considerable wisdom packed into these two brief books, and whatever darkness he evokes is quickly counterbalanced by humor and insight. He’s offering sage advice on how to live, perhaps summing it up best in these, my favorite lines of his: “Life as a limerick? / How simple. / How plain. / How easy to explain.”

David A. James lives in Fairbanks.