Bill Yake

Bill Yake (1947-2022) was a poet, naturalist, photographer, traveler, and occasional essayist who lived with his wife, Jeannette, on the verge of a ravine carved by a small chum salmon creek. Green Cove Creek feeds the southern Salish Sea (Puget Sound). It is a world rich in water, forests, mushrooms, owls, and mollusks.

 

Place is central — experiences in both Cascadia and in far lands: the lightning storms of Palenque, swimming with sea lion adolescents in the Sea of Cortez, encounters with bones of monks in vaults beneath  Viennese cathedrals — all find their ways into these poems.   

 

The work has been published quite widely, especially in books, magazines, and anthologies serving the environmental and literary communities — from Orion to Poetry, from Wilderness to Terrain.org, from Rattle to ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Poems have also been featured on NPR, including Krulwich Wonders.

 

For many years Bill worked as a senior environmental scientist with the Washington State Department of Ecology leading studies of toxic contamination in rivers, lakes, marine systems, soils, fish, aquifers, and sediments. The stories told by sediment cores were especially engaging — successes and failures, nature's relentlessness — not unlike the inferences drawn from poems.