They’ve camped in national parks, hiked mountain trails, photographed springtime flowers in Death Valley and wintry surf along the rugged beaches of Northern California.

They’ve watched July 4th fireworks over Lake Tahoe, explored the Taos Pueblo and ridden the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad through forests ablaze with autumn colors. They’ve ridden the amazing Falkirk Wheel in Scotland and the exciting Flam Railway in Norway.

And everywhere they go, they capture unforgettable moments—Al with his camera and Sunny with her reporter’s notebook. Their work has been published in magazines and newspapers. It has been recognized with awards from the National Federation of Press Women and the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

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“The hardest thing for me was that my wife and I were partners, deeply, spiritually, intellectually,” he says. “When it happened it was like someone had chopped me in half. On the Brac I have fabulous friends and I love the community, but I had to find a way to make a decision what to do.”

Over the course of the next year he traveled extensively, exploring his grief as well as his future, as he tried to find a balance to his life and work—between writing and environmentalism, his university job and his peace on the island. And he returned, after many years, to writing poetry. What grew out of that period of searching is a collection of 49 poems that reflect Martin’s explorations, both internal and external, summed up and reflected in the title.

Life is interesting, in part, because many people are unaware of its inherent shifts and changes, structurally and creatively, he writes. “We would like to think that our lives are some sort of continuity, are contiguous, but I think in one sense they are made up of lots of different little fragments which come together sometimes, and sometimes they fall apart.

“The phases that I have been through, which are recorded here, are very much a part of who I am now. They are a mixture of my life before it happened and they are still there. Bits and pieces come together but that’s what lives are—made up of lots of different little fragments. We try to separate them, separate work and pleasure, home and kids and all that, but in actual fact it’s very hard to do that,” Martin reveals.

The voice that emerges from these poems captures the essence of a man whose sense of self is the accretion of so many parts, slowly, inevitably coming together—and, as they add to the whole, the center of gravity adjusts as well. The result is an emotionally dangerous yet ultimately hope-filled portrait of a life fully lived.

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