Therapeutic poetry

Moses Lake man publishes book of poems

MOSES LAKE - David L. Geer is feeling a little unreal.

He recently received the first shipment of his first book of poems, "For the Love of Nature and a Broken Heart."

"It's kind of surreal right now," he said.

Geer "hopes to capture the feelings that are within each of us - the feelings that are troubling to speak about and that make us all remember some trial that we have all gone through," publishing company PublishAmerica stated. "The author hopes these poems will expunge from others their own feelings and bring focus to lost feelings of love and understanding that are a part of their lives. (He) wishes to inspire new authors to put their thoughts on paper and make them a part of his/her history that will outlast the mortal body."

Geer's family moved to Moses Lake in 1964, seeking to raise cattle somewhere in the area between Spokane and Wenatchee after his father retired from the Marine Corps in the southern California area.

Geer graduated from Moses Lake High School in 1974.

"What was going to pay for my college was the cattle farm," he said.

"Well, in 1974, the cattle market fell out, so I had to work my way through college."

After graduating from Washington State University with a forestry degree, Geer began looking for work.

"But it was pretty tough, so I'd always end up coming home, and ended up working different jobs around town," he said. "My last major job, I owned my own home repair business. The secretary and a couple other employees embezzled all the company's funds and I lost the business, lost everything."

Geer entered into a depression, and said he is still seeing people at Grant Mental Health.

"The poems were a way of getting into the inner me and helping with therapy," he explained.

After a while, he sent publishing company PublishAmerica several poems for evaluation. After they viewed 25, they expressed interest in receiving a total of 50.

"Well, I didn't have 50 written by then, so I started writing more," Geer recalled.

Geer said he has a hard time describing what the poems in his book are about.

"It's something I've been writing in for two years, and a lot of them were when I was in an emotional, depressed state or something," he said. "That's when the best poetry came out. When it came time to go back and try and edit it, I didn't want to change it too much."

The publishing company included a note in the book that it has allowed the material to remain as the author intended without editorial input.

"It made sense to me when I was in a state of anxiety or in a panic attack, I could just throw together all this stuff about a spider web," Geer said. "There's going to be a lot of stuff in there that people aren't probably going to understand. I can see it real easy, a lot of people are going to buy it and say, 'What a piece of crap,' but some of them were when I was in a good mood."

The good mood portion of the book includes poems about Geer's childhood growing up on a farm, doing chores with his father and going hunting with his dog.

"There's a lot of poems in there about your first love, the breakup of your first love and the pain that's it's caused and the continuous pain and never being able to forget," Geer said. "But there's also a good number of poems that are about nature. I've got some about bald eagles and spiders and just things that because I got my degree in forestry, I went off on that for a little bit."

Geer said he isn't working on other poems at the moment, but his therapist is working to get him writing more, he said.

In the acknowledgments section of his book, Geer notes the poetry began as a practical therapy session for his depression and anxiety.

"I'm throwing myself out there, kind of vulnerable," he noted with a chuckle. "But that's where they're coming from … That's the reason for the poems."

Publish America also published a compilation of writing about farm life by Geer's mother, Betty Geer, a proofreader at the Columbia Basin Herald in the 1960s.

Geer has two daughters and two grandchildren. One of his daughters provided the cover artwork for the book, he said.

The book is available through Geer at his e-mail address, geerdav1@yahoo.com, or at online bookstores.