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.) 

Paula Becker, A LITTLE BOOK OF SELF-CARE FOR THOSE WHO GRIEVE

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A LITTLE BOOK OF SELF-CARE FOR THOSE WHO GRIEVE, Paula Becker, Girl Friday Productions, 2021.

I want to share this book with you. It’s not poetry, but it’s a lot like poetry, and recommends it: “Poetry can crack grief open and smooth it down, howl its depths…” The book combines beautiful illustrations by Rebekah Nichols. The design is by Rachel Marek, but the book is a collaboration. The art and ample white space give the words room to breathe.

Ask friends for help when you are overwhelmed. Do not set time limits for yourself. If grief flares suddenly, as grief will do, cancel plans, even at the last minute.

The book is available widely — your local independent bookshop may have a copy waiting for you.

 

Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

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THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Here’s the final poem, which first appeared in Poetry International: 

Homecoming

I put on my good black shoes, my shirt
of grey softness that reminds me of luck,

and the blue hat given me
by a child who left

this earth that even her shadow
made so beautiful.

And then, well, I set out
down the clamor of roads

and, almost by accident, onto paths
through dense apothecaries of evergreen and fern

and finally to meadow and orchard
risen from the dead into a contentment

that did not know me
and wouldn’t take my money or my name.

Did I not see I was the same no one
who had lived there always

and could never return?
Did I not perceive the multitudes

waving their arms like wind to be known again
and gathered like pieces of a god?

How many many years, how much spent blood,
to unpilgrim ourselves, to stand before an empty house

glistening with the grief of a happy life.

—Christopher Howell

“…and after that there must be the dancing” he writes in “Surveillance.” Or, “the dancing / and the weeping / and the feast.”

You can learn more about Christopher Howell at https://www.eou.edu/mfa/faculty/christopher-howell-poetry/, or on Wikipedia and Artist Trust. I found “A Conversation with Christopher Howell” about this particular book at https://truemag.org/2018/11/08/a-conversation-with-christopher-howell/.