Edward Harkness, CREEK WATER: NEW & SELECTED POEMS

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CREEK WATER: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, Edward Harkness, Empty Bowl, 2025.

National Poetry Month is slipping away, but if I lower the bar a bit, I think I can get in two more books for you.

And it was such a pleasure to spend time this morning with northwest poet Ed Harkness’s Creek Water. In his many poems celebrating the natural world, but also when he turns his attention to our difficult politically- and violence-charged news stories, his is a faithful and a reliable witness. Ann Pitkin calls Creek Water  “a rich, generous-hearted collection, moving testament by a man of passionate conscience.” Amen.

When Should We Say Something

I don’t know. Yesterday.
Elsewhere, in a school classroom,
a missile strike
erases our future

in some far-off country
always elsewhere. I don’t know
how to reach out
to touch your cheek. The cosmos

you planted nod Ah, yes.
I don’t know anything as
delicate as
those silky lavender blades

radiant from gold hubs.
In the late light of summer,
the last garden
tomatoes droop like blood moons.

On a sunflower crown,
a nuthatch clicks and winces,
a sound I love,
akin to a wagon wheel

in need of oil. Elsewhere,
a tank shell finds the bedroom
window of two
sisters asleep, neither one

yet twelve. Their bed explodes.
Elsewhere, two sisters pass by
on the sidewalk,
neither one yet twelve, chatting

to the clack of skateboards
on the pavements gray. Dear ones,
make a new world.
I’ve spent my voice. It’s your turn.

—Edward Harkness

To learn more about Harkness and how to purchase Creek Water, visit Empty Bowl. I also found him at Artist Trust, and reading two poems at Terrain.com. I previously reviewed his work here.

Two Books by Susan Landgraf

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JOURNEY OF TREES, Susan Landgraf, The Poetry Box Publishing, 2024. Finalist for the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize.

THE INSPIRED POET: WRITING EXERCISES TO SPARK NEW WORK, Susan Landgraf, Two Sylvias Press, 2019.

In the words of Jane Wong, the poems in Journey of Trees are “fed by the kindling of myth and lyrical curiosity.” Sati Mookherjee tells us the poems “show how we story-tell our way into truth-telling.” More proof that poetry is a good path for us to find ourselves on.

I purchased both of these books in June of 2024, right before my life began unraveling. They have waited patiently on my shelf for me to rediscover them, and National Poetry Month provides a perfect time to have done so.

The 37 exercises in The Inspired Poet include “Writing into Our Fears,” “Leaping Poetry,” “It’s a Piece of Cake,” acrostics, list poems, and “Thinking in Similes.” Each exercise offers example poems, for instance the simile-rich “Love Poem Without a Drop of Hyperbole in It,” from Traci Brimhall; the final poem in the book is Samuel Green’s brilliant “Some Reasons Why I Became a Poet.”

Landgraf is a long-time teacher of poetry and workshop leader herself, and, in short, this book is well worth your attention.

One poem from Journey of Trees— 

The Ten Stations of Worship

This is the hand held for safety’s sake,
palms raised to show the most traveled paths.

This is the foot, bunioned and mud-stained—Russian
steppes, ice caves, olive groves.

This is the leg, striding or curved, lotus-like
in the California poppies.

This is the eye of curled ferns and symbols.
This is the eye of permission. Amen.

This is the lap, a nest of goose down.
We’ve learned to fold and to wait.

This is the breast we come to and come to—
our need for suckle and beauty and grace.

This is the seed pod moist
with rain.

This is the other mouth
we depend on—the telling and retelling

in this temple of trees.

—Susan Landgraf

 I recently came across (again) the words of Wislawa Szymborska:  “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems” (from her poem, “Possibilities”). I’ve been questioning why I wanted to do so many reviews in April (when I have plenty else to keep me busy), and why I over-indulged on Independent Bookstore Day and bought a bunch more poetry books. Szymborska helps me understand myself, and this quote, from the great Grace Paley, shared by Landgraf (p. 177), helps, too:

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, [but] buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

(Interview from The Paris Review, 1992)

It’s not your obsession, Bethany, it’s your passion. (And such good company on the journey.) 

BIRDBRAINS: A LYRICAL GUIDE TO WASHINGTON STATE BIRDS

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BIRDBRAINS: A LYRICAL GUIDE TO WASHINGTON STATE BIRDS, ed. Susan Rich. Raven Chronicles Press, 2025.

I have two poems in this lovely book, lovingly curated by Susan Rich, assisted by bird note author Stephanie Delaney and artist Hiroko Seki. The poems are narrative and lyrical, longish and very short. The poets include Martha Silano, Jayne Marek, Kevin Craft, Joannie Stangeland, Sandra Yannone, Ted Kooser, Carolyn Forché, Mary Ellen Talley, Susan Landgraf—and so many others I’ve written about in these pages. You simply have to see for yourself.

Here is one of my poems:

Golden Diva

No bigger than a puff
of dandelion fluff, round bobbin
on a bare twig, breast
of muted light, gold-daubed head,
beak and feet tucked tight,
wings wrapped against wind.

Reflected in a puddle, up-
side down, crowned
by cumulous clouds, imbiber
of dew and seeds, tiny diva,
rouged beauty hopping branch
to water, and back.

—Bethany Reid, from Birdbrains (p. 241)

Tomorrow evening (Monday, April 27, 6 p.m.), I’ll be joining several other Birdbrains contributors to read at Everett Poetry Night (The Sisters Restaurant, Grand Avenue, Everett).

P.S. This morning I came across this post from Maria Popova at The Marginalian: “The Bird that Is Your Life.” Maybe you need to read it, too.

Caitlin Dwyer, IN THE SALT

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IN THE SALT, Caitlin Dwyer, MoonPath Press, 2026.

Winner of the 2025 Sally Albiso Award

How much more praise can I lavish on this quirky, brilliant collection of poems? The book is woven of two main strands: the female characters of Homer’s Odyssey, and the story of the birth and imperiled early life of Dwyer’s son, Quinn, to whom the book is dedicated. The book is woven of dreams, myths, nightmares, and hope. In a way the book is about weaving, and it is Penelope working at her loom that makes this theme clear. She weaves cloth (unweaving it each night, if you’re unfamiliar), as she fends off suitors, longs for her husband’s return, and watches her son grow up.

Strategies I found effective in making the whole coherent were Penelope’s dream sequences of untitled poems; and the several poems titled “Waste Thread” that are scattered throughout, like wasted threads on the floor under a loom. Some of these are short as two lines, but here’s a longer example:

Waste Thread

Silver-tipped rhododendrons.
Lichen-speckled bark.
I close my eyes and dream of rain, wake
and dream of rain. My eyes blur
when I try to focus. When I gaze out
of my eyes and not my head, I feel alive.
Nose in the wet soil. Songs of worm-trace
and limestone, shell-break, calcium pulver.
Phlox in the cracks. I close my eyes
and sugar-syrup coats my tongue, crystallized
honey cracked against a bad tooth.

—Caitlin Dwyer

Sometimes (often) the lines blur. Is this Penelope, wasting threads, or is this our poet?

Waste Thread

Buddha says we are all capable of waking up.
The human mind is nothing but sky-flowers.
Cataracts, clouds. Perhaps because I value the body
that made him, I cannot see my son clearly;
he dashes this way and that, wet petals, blur.

—Caitlin Dwyer

The final poem, “Song to Call a Body from the Salt,” begins—

Do you recognize the constellations yet?
The bear, the cored apple, the crab? The mother
with her hands full of stars

—and what I notice here is not only the lovely enjambment of the second line into the third, but also an education in progress. A mother, teaching her son about the constellations; a mother, learning to be present with your young son; and the poet, schooling us on her art.

Visit Dwyer’s website to find more poems from the book (including “Changeling,” one of my favorites). You can order a copy from MoonPath Press, or your local independent bookshop.