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Books by Ed Harkness
To order Avalanche: A Survival Guide, go to
Blue Cedar Press
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
To order The Law of the Unforeseen, go to
If the law of the unforeseen is ever formally codified, those who seek its establishment may want to consult this version, by Edward Harkness. The Law of the Unforeseen examines the present, the now that is a mystery until the moment it arrives. It’s a beautiful instant, then it’s the past. The law Harkness speaks of requires us to know now and then. We walk under “the trees of unremembrance,” so that we may know who we are, how we got here, and who we came from. And we arrive in this lovely, fragile, and threatened paradise called Earth, right now. The “endless replication of clam shells, ants, / hyacinths in spring”?—it’s true, we will lose those things, individually, but these poems savor such stuff, and in that savoring they give us hope for the future.
~Robert Wrigley, author of A True Account of My Life as a Bird
In Beautiful Passing Lives (2010, Pleasure Boat Studio Press), Edward Harkness ranges freely in time and space, gleaning grace from moments small and large: from the weave of marsh grass to the ovens of Dachau. With an unflinching gaze, he considers events in history we'd rather forget, recording with exacting detail and an alternately dispassionate and fierce voice 'the dark we swim in.' .... These intimate poems, resonant with the voids of family, friends and mentors, lost and departed, chronicle all that is 'seen, unseen and deep,' reminding us that redemption is everywhere and of the power of art to transform. Like the best sleight of hand, they 'glitter still, and glide offshore on nothing.'
~Holly J. Hughes, author of Boxing the Compass and Sailing by Ravens.
To order Beautiful Passing Lives, go to
Pleasure Boat Studio
To order Saying the Necessary, go to Pleasure Boat Studio
Saying the Necessary reveals an unerring eye for significant detail. The balance between reality and imagination in Edward Harkness' poems is so precarious and the language so persuasive that the reader identifies with the speaker, undergoes the same metamorphoses. Whether we suffer the diatribes of a coach Bitterbender, miraculously changed to extravagant praise; or contemplate a mailbox, half-hidden by a shrub , until it becomes a stranger hugging a fiddle in a gunny sack, the effect is the same: we understand the difference between what we recognize and what we realize.
~Madeline Defrees, author of Blue Dusk
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