Description:
Skillfully crafted poems are paintings and recordings lending visual and aural insights into the life of the world.
Brief description: Edward Harkness has deep Seattle roots. His great-grandmother, Sophia Graff, was born in 1870 near Alki Point, site of the Denny Party landing only 20 years earlier. It's not likely the Dennys and other Seattle founding mothers and fathers could have imagined their beach tents and log cabins as the future home of Amazon, Google and Starbucks. Harkness grew up in Seattle's north end, went to local schools, including the University of Washington, where he wrote his first unpromising poems in classes taught by Richard Hugo, Madeline Defrees, Mark Strand and David Wagoner. Harkness followed Hugo and Defrees back to Missoula and the University of Montana where he earned an MFA degree in Creative Writing. After a two-year stint in the Artist-in-the-Schools program in Montana, Idaho, Oregon and back in his home state of Washington, Shoreline College gave him a crack at teaching writing and literature. That gig lasted 33 years. Harkness is the author of three previous books of poetry, Saying the Necessary, Beautiful Passing Lives, and most recently, The Law of the Unforeseen (2018, Pleasure Boat Studio press). He is the happy, unabashedly proud father of Devin and Ned, both teachers in Portland OR. He counts himself blessed beyond measure to be in love with Linda, his soulmate of 49 years. He and Linda are avid cyclists, gardeners and kayakers in their tandem kayak, fondly known as Big Blue. They live in Shoreline, Washington.
Review Quotes:
Edward Harkness has established himself as one of the essential voices of his
beloved Pacific Northwest, even as he has shown that he is no way bound by mere
regionalism. Besides his sharp eye for images, his immaculate ear for how words
bounce off, rub against or embrace one another, he also shows a mastery of form
that is too often missing in many less accomplished poets publishing today. Can a
collection called Avalanche: A Survival Guide live up to its title? Yes. And this one
does, taking on uncomfortable racial, social and emotional issues with common
sense and clarity, instead of mere popular rant. "Above all, this: Be a beacon," he
says in the title poem. And certainly he has taken his own good advice. This is a
poet who not only speaks for us, but teaches us how we might speak for ourselves.
Sam Green, founding publisher with Sally Green of Brooding Heron Press,
and author, most recently, of Disturbing the Light
In Ed Harkness' latest collection, Avalanche: A Survival Guide, he turns his
ever-attentive gaze toward his own life, remembering as a kid "how long he'd
gaze, wanting to be beauty-struck." That long gaze deeply informs the poems in
his fourth full-length collection, as he drops into moments we might otherwise
miss. Wide-ranging in their focus-from a Song dynasty poet to not cutting down
an Italian plum tree-these ambitious poems are threaded together by Harkness's
belief in the luminous detail and its ability to save us. As he writes in the harrowing
title poem, "your salvation may depend on your ability to sparkle in the dark."
That's exactly what these poems do: beam a light into the darkness, "each...a
spark to mark the trail that lies ahead."
Holly J. Hughes, author of Hold Fast and Passings, winner of an
American Book Award
A lifetime ago, the iconic Northwest poet, Richard Hugo, would dazzle his
writing students with a poem called "The Man in the Recreation Room"-written
by recent graduate, fellow Seattle-native, Edward Harkness. It was a villanelle,
a real high-wire act of a poem, intricate, shape-shifting, haunting. I like to freeze
the frame there, with Hugo already detecting in Harkness's voice the heart and
daring that would fuel the books to come-among them, Beautiful Passing Lives,
The Law of the Unforeseen, and Saying the Necessary. And now we have a new
collection, Avalanche: A Survival Guide, poems that pay exquisite attention to our
world. No poet I know moves so nimbly between the cadences of formal poetry
and the quirky, often hilarious, rhythms of actual speech . . . or devotes himself so
lovingly to family-past, present, and future. Put simply: Edward Harkness has
become an indispensable poet.
David Long, author of The Inhabited World and The Daughters of
Simon Lamoreaux