The Jack Gunter Series
Available in the summer of 2024 via the Ravenna Press website—a boxed set produced in collaboration with Camano Island artist Jack Gunter, his art gracing all three covers and the slipcase of this Rantala trilogy of new and recent poetry, edited by Harold Bowes:
At Last Call the Geese
At Last Call the Geese offers several regional poems, among other topics, centered on the rural areas from Edmonds north through the Skagit Valley, the epigraph reminding us, as Madeline De Frees put it:
"We have only this night and the one behind it."
The Gunter painting is of the geese that snow in their great numbers on the fields around Mt. Vernon.
East
East, an achingly spare poetic journey of grief through the sparse landscapes and scrub of Eastern Washington, offers poems tied to particular places or geological features. The epigraph quotes the recently lost Wendy Barker and beautifully murmurs in the minds of the people in the Gunter painting:
"How can a moon
slip so far down
those concrete walls?"
Kipling's Minor
Kipling's Minor offers at times ecstatic poems that revel in travel, saints and loss. The epigraph references Richard Eberhart's line "Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament" and gorgeously coordinates with Gunter's "St. Theresa in Ecstasy":
I stood there in the whirling summer
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.