By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Staff Writer

The ocean is enticing and deadly, a cradle and a stranger, a place of lulling peace that, in the end, isn't our home.

This tension is laced through Michael McPherson's surfing poetry and prose, which recalls his young years surfing, hanging out with his father's beachboy friends and his own. Also in this collection are poems that date to more recent times, as he considers his surfing life in the light of middle-aged perspective.

The 9›-by-12-inch oversize book is a marriage of the visual and literary, punctuated by photography by Zak Noyle, David Darling and Tim McCullough, as well as vintage pieces from the author's scrapbook and the collection he endowed in the State Archives.

The pieces — free-form poems, a couple of short stories, an essay about an aging beachboy — evoke the joy of wave-riding and beach-playing: "Blue water and a/ pink hotel in the time when/ surfing was young." But the writer is also deeply cognizant of what has been lost in the Islands, and of the wave-speed with which life flows by. In "Maalaea Bay," he writes: "Across from the harbor the old store/still sells its famous hot dogs,/but the quiet in this evening sky/ whispers of a coming dark, expansion/ and rock groins to block new waves/ from reaching the gentle arc of the reef."

In another poem, about a trio of older surfers on an unexpected, perfect afternoon: "time utterly still as if this could be 1963, we're/ boys again, alone in the grace of Hawaii's best summer left slide,/ over an hour laughing ourselves senseless where sunlight never ends."

Poem after poem rides a break that hints of going on forever, carrying the rider from blue water into blue haze. Always, there is that tension between the joy and its inevitable end, but with never a drop of sickly sentiment. This is maturity both in writing and in a person.

Lines from the book, and the emotions and thoughts they raise, play in the reader's mind like the dappling of sun burned onto the retina when you close your eyes at the beach.