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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.

Edward Harkness: The Law of the Unforeseen

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Our reading at Elliott Bay Books is only one week away! Here’s a poem from Ed’s newest book. I’ve discovered that you can find him all over the web, including Verse Daily and Terrain.

 

One of the things (or two) that I love about Ed’s poems is their range. He strikes me as a thoroughly Pacific Northwest poet, and yet he weaves in  his international rovings, musings about historical and fictional characters, and observations of natural phenomenon from all over the globe, and he does so in such a way that I feel as though I am there, too.

Here is a short poem that gives me that sense of a wholly unfamiliar place (to me), now made knowable.

 

Ed Harkness

 

ICEBERGS NEAR TWILLINGATE

From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, en route
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.

 

from The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2018)