FAIRBANKS - The town of Fairbanks lost one of its finer citizens this winter when Marjorie Kowalski Cole died of cancer in December at the far-too-young age of 56. A resident of Alaska for more than 40 years, Kowalski Cole was deeply involved with our community on numerous levels, and touched countless lives along the way. I got to know Marjorie over the final decade of her life, and while we were never close friends, she was one of those people I was always happy to run into.

Her words were unceasingly positive, and as a fellow writer she frequently and insightfully commented on my work. Behind her quiet, dignified manner I quickly discovered a resolute moral sensibility and an intensively active mind. What struck me most about Marjorie was that she spent significantly more time than most of us engaged in that sadly undervalued act of thinking. Fortunately for Marjorie’s many friends, as well as those who never met her, she frequently put her thoughts down on paper, often in the form of short, penetrating poetry. “Inside, Outside, Morningside,” a collection of some of her work has just been published by the Ester Republic Press, providing readers with an opportunity to discover a voice that was taken from us too soon.

Kowalski Cole was well known for being active on a number of social issues, but her poetry leans toward the personal. The pieces collected here range over her observations of nature, her relationships with her sons and her second husband, her travels, her Catholic faith, and her daily activities. Other topics that appear in passing include her past problems with alcohol, a couple of brief political commentaries, and the illness that ended her life.

The work is intensely revealing (at a couple of points it’s a bit too revealing for my tastes; I’m of the opinion that our American tendency to bare all has gotten somewhat out of hand, but many would disagree with me on this view). But while the poems are deeply felt, the poet isn’t selfobsessed. Kowalski Cole was, more than anything else, an observer. And she possessed a rare gift for finding words that brought her observations to life.

One example of this talent finds her viewing a sunset over the Chukchi Sea. “Never before,” she tells us, “have I seen the shape of the planet / until now, standing at the edge of the frozen ocean. / Arrested in midcurl, arctic ice is tidied up / where it meets the horizon, becomes the perfect edge / of a coin.” Turning from the beauty she is witnessing, she looks toward the town she is standing in and notes, “From boxy houses villagers tumble out / to retrieve children, rent a movie, then disappear inside.” And then, returning to her previous vista, she watches as “The sun, another coin, slips away by degrees / into someone else’s bank.” This sort of juxtaposition of the beautiful and the mundane appears more than once in this collection. In “Light and Its Absence” she contrasts two churches. The first is one she visited as a child where in its darkened chapel she found “Everywhere carvings / like footnotes in stone. / They left no surface unworked in the old days.” Many years later in adulthood she attends “a blazing new parish in Fairbanks, Alaska, / the one great room is white with light. / It could be a dentist’s office; globes like snowballs / press on my eyes, threaten to conquer sin with wattage.”

It’s an unsettling vision of just how sterile and dehumanized our houses of worship have become, but she finds hope upon exiting the building where “A halogen lamp near the sidewalk / illuminates a birch tree, whose frosted branches / weave a basket above our heads against the night.”

Kowalski Cole found her solace in nature, but she knew it could never offer full refuge from this world, where both tragedy and triumph are always close at hand. In “The Playing Field” she celebrates the intoxicating summer sun of Fairbanks: “Birch / and aspen explode, light green / bulging over the road.” But under that longed-for daylight, “The sun like an open stove / at this hour burns the eyes / of the woman leaving her husband. / Across town an eight grader / learns to slide into third / covering new white pants / with dirt, oh the glory of it.” Nature can indeed be brutal, as all of us who experienced the summer of 2004 here in Fairbanks recall. That year the sun was robbed from us by wildfires that left us choking in a sea of smoke. In “FireFilled Summer” Kowalski Cole perfectly evokes the eeriness that gripped us as “We woke each day to quiet and stillness, / the smell of war around us but no war… Drivers… peering ahead / down roads no longer familiar… and something called the sun grew in size, / changed color, moved in and out of haze.”

Kowalski Cole was at her best, however, when summarizing the natural world with brief but telling observations. Of a mother moose she writes, “Her ribs press against the brown suitcase of her hide. / She looks exhausted.” Spruce trees cover a slope “like a punk haircut.” A beloved cat has “split-lentil eyes.” Leafhoppers are found “foraging below the tips of unmown grass / like a million out of work low-level musicians.”

And amanita mushrooms are “tawdry as revelers the day after Mardi Gras.”

“Inside, Outside, Morningside” is brimming with such wordplay. In the closing words, one that can stand as a coda for the author’s life and work, she writes, “God put me here / to leap forward with my empty bowl/ to describe a circle / with my spoon.”

Marjorie Kowalski Cole presence will be missed for many years to come, but thanks to this book, her spirit remains.

David A. James lives in Fairbanks.

Inside, Outside, Morningside

Marjorie Kowalski Cole

Ester Republic Press

88 pages 2009 $12.00