"The Extremities"
Timothy Kelly
Oberlin College Press
68 pages
$15

"Meaning a Cloud"
J.W. Marshall
Oberlin College Press
79 pages
$15.95

Is it too much to ask for a contemplative spell during the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer?

I've been thumbing through two books of poetry that provide that kind of relief.

In its latest batch of releases, Oberlin College Press has brought out volumes from two Northwest poets.

"The Extremities" offers a detailed map of the human body as perhaps we've never considered it. Timothy Kelly, who is an Olympia physical therapist as well as a poet, is uniquely qualified to turn our very sinews and bones into metaphor.

From the startle reflex of a newborn, to the dwindling of the body at the end of life, Kelly creates descriptions in careful detail. He is eager to share his fascination with the body: "the precise mechanics, the twisting histories, the privileged questions, positioned limbs, the pivotal placement of a hand."

And those deft and crucial relationships are reflected in his word choices, too. His description of how fingers work is spellbinding: "the balanced mechanics, tensioned lines, tracked pulleys, and action fine and subtle ..." But Kelly works with patients whose hands no longer know how to work for themselves, and who observe "the odd choreography sourly" having forgotten their own "larking touch."

One of my favorite selections is "Each Step is a Fall Interrupted." It is a poem about hiking in the North Cascades, but even as Kelly describes the physical actions of putting one foot in front of the other, "the timely, rescuing, still-oddly-astonishing next step," he is also illuminating the mysterious process of falling in love.

But wait there's a sequel: years later, the aging lovers continue their tradition of hiking, despite "the seditious grind of bone on bone" and the necessity of hovering around "the flaming altar of the campstove" at day's end, waiting for tea water with which to gulp down their ibuprofen. This is a wonderful poem, fed with passion and tinged with rue.

Seattle poet J.W. Marshall strikes some similar chords with his first full-length collection, "Meaning a Cloud." The co-owner of a poetry bookstore in Seattle, Marshall has seen plenty of words come and go.

He chooses to write in pared-down style, describing life traumas without hyperbole, letting his words quietly singe the consciousness.

Many of his poems describe his own experience as a patient, recovering in a hospital after an accident. His life was in disjointed pieces, like the jigsaw puzzle in the hospital day room, and the tiny increments of his therapy seemed insurmountable. "They might as well have spilled a box of keys; nothing seemed to lock anymore."

Other poems are meditations on his mother's slow decline into death.

When she is unable to do simple things for herself any longer, she is relegated to the nursing home desolation of mumbling through hymns in a "sock puppet chorus" led by "dour Scandinavians."

But there is ferocity and the occasional glimmer of humor at life's end, too. Marshall's unblinking poems chronicle the roiling culmination of life.