Missing Pieces by Kathryn Rantala Subject: Poetry Publisher: Ocean View (USA) Edition Our Price inc. p&p Status first edition trade paperback, 103pp, ISBN 0938075284, 1999 UK only: £25.00 in stock

Here, indeed, is the sound of silence. Kathryn Rantala's words must be taken as vital evidence in the endless earch for meaning in the absences of lives. Steve Sneyd

Seattle in the Thirties and Forties was a sometimes seedy, often melancholy place, full of toil (if you were lucky enough to be working), human tragedy and blue-collar boredom. Leo Lassen's night baseball broadcasts were the city's most popular entertainment. Crime was commonplace. Frequently it fell to deputies in what today is called the Medical Examiner's Office to reconstruct the facts about those with shattered bodies and fractured lives.

Kathryn Rantala has retrieved those images from Seattle's past in Missing Pieces, a fusion of poetry and prose given added strength by a collection of photographs from the King County Medical Examiner's archives. The photos are not morbid, but instead add texture to Rantala's non-conventional poems and poignant essays about Seattle before it became the glossily nick-named Emerald City. Rantala's work is at once artfully complex and devastatingly true.