The Law of the Unforeseen is about family, history, family history, the natural world—its beauty, its degradation—the strange miracle of consciousness. I write about the blues, failure, great apes, time passing, icebergs, massage therapy, the Civil War, crows, bats, potatoes, spoons, and drones. Nothing is off the table. In fact, everything is on the table, including the fabled kitchen sink. (Front and back cover art by Doris Harkness, his mother).
The poet Galway Kinnell once said that when writing a poem, the deeper you go inside yourself, and the more intimate you become in the process of composing and engaging language with your whole being, a strange thing happens. The poem, Kinnell said, becomes both personal and universal. By diving deep, the poem discovers—or uncovers—what binds us, what we all feel: the quickened heart of recognition and shared emotions. That’s what I’ve aimed for in The Law of the Unforeseen: to plumb deep, to find “the best words in their best order,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said in his famous distinction between prose (“…words in the best order.”) and poetry (“…the best words in the best order”).
“In the poems of The Law of the Unforeseen, Ed is still showing that enthusiasm for entering wholeheartedly into whatever life he finds around him…Maybe what strikes me most about this collection is not only its ability to enter so empathetically into both the joys and the sorrows…but to insist on the power of just keeping on keeping on in the face of despair about the current condition of our war-ridden, climate-threatened, frustrating world. When I mentioned this to Ed, he pointed out how poets believe so strongly in the power of words to save us. That belief crops up often in these poems.” – Sibyl James, terrain.org
To his everlasting regret, Edward Harkness did not see Elvis when the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll visited Seattle during the World’s Fair in 1962. Other than that, Harkness is a happy husband to Linda, father to Ned and Devin, and grandfather to Clio and Hilde. Having retired after a 30+ year career as a writing teacher at Shoreline Community College, he now devotes his time to other pleasures: gardening, cycling, visiting the kids and, now and then, making poems. He is the author of two other full-length poetry collections, Saying the Necessary and Beautiful Passing Lives, both from Pleasure Boat Studio. His most recent chapbook, Ice Children, was published by Split Lip Press in 2014. Two poems in this collection, “Tying a Tie” and “Airborne,” won the Terrain.org annual poetry prize for 2017. He lives in Shoreline, Washington, about a mile from the north Seattle home where he grew up, and where his mother, Doris Harkness, whose art works grace the covers of this book, still lives.
Other PBS books by Edward Harkness: Beautiful Passing Lives, Saying the Necessary
INTERVIEW WITH SPLIT LIP PRESS MAGAZINE ‘He is the man, myth and legend, folks––Ed Harkness, runner-up of the Split Lip Press 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Awards’ Article on poetry process, open minded reflections on what makes a poet a poet, the development as a youth to love of sound and language, and what a beginning poet can do to grow as a poet.’
An interview with Ed Harkness by Wenatchee radio talk show host, Michael Knight:
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Poem from The Law of the Unforeseen
Honeymoon
A delirium of blossoms, he recalled.
Here we are on the bank of the Huzo,
walking in pink snow.
They were Americans, in love with love,
spellbound by pictures of Mount Fuji
they’d seen in National Geographic.
And there it was, appearing at sunrise
on the train window. How about that,
he’d said, waking her. It seems to hover.
It’s a vision, a floating island,
a perfect cone, just like the photos—
so symmetrical, so ideal, darling, like you.
In Kyoto, the river glided,
bright as mica, tinged with glacial till.
All the city, it seemed, had come to savor
the soft explosions of cherry trees,
just as they had come, these newlyweds,
arriving in a rickshaw, crowding with others
onto boats poled by young men
whose tanned arms glistened in April sun.
Then, excursions to temples and gardens,
where the azaleas had just begun to ignite
among the Zen stones. Such tranquility,
he told her on a stroll. Such harmony
with the natural world, don’t you think?
You won’t find that back home.
They even made love in a bamboo grove,
he remembered, thinking at the time
they were alone, with only the calls
of the different birds high in the green light,
then noticing as she rolled off him onto the moss,
her skirt askew, they were being watched.
An old woman in a conical hat smiled.
They smiled, mortified, unable to answer
the woman’s slight bow and greeting: Konnichiwa.
So long ago it was, that afternoon in the city
of pagodas and monuments, markets thronged
and rich with smells they’d never smelled.
Now, for Christ’s sake, they want to try out
the new bomb—Fat Boy, or Fat Man, or something—
on Kyoto, our Kyoto, where we climbed above the river
to that temple. What was it called? She wept, even,
when statues of the Buddha would appear
as if by magic, like sudden awakenings, among the pines.
He could imagine the shrines flattened,
ancient timbers blown to kindling by the blast,
the curved black roof tiles of ten-thousand buildings
swirling in typhoons of white fire.
Our city, for God’s sake. Our city.
Even the ice-fed Huzo would boil,
its boats aflame by the collapsed bridge
they’d walked across a dozen times,
and the young men who poled the boats—
they’d be burned to death in seconds.
So charmed the couple had been, so taken
by the politeness of the bowing Japanese,
so delighted were they when,
pulling their phrasebooks from their rucksacks,
they’d stutter a few words to a shopkeeper
or a woman planting rice shoots
along a road, and be understood.
He would demand that the committee
remove Kyoto from the list of targets.
Surely there were other cities more suitable
from a military standpoint,
more appropriate strategically.
What about Kokura’s munitions plants?
What about Yokohama or Hiroshima?
No matter what General X said or what General Y
argued would be the Emperor’s next move,
no matter what logic or tactical line of thinking
they’d array on their table of maps,
damage projections, casualty estimates,
he’d hold the line. He would not stand by
to see Kyoto—their Kyoto—
reduced to miles of radioactive ash.
The bomb, he vowed, would be dropped,
just not on the city he loved, his Kyoto.
His decision would be final.
Was he or was he not Secretary of War?
He’d go to Truman, if necessary,
get the full backing of the President.
Not one Shinto shrine, goddamn it.
Not one Zen pavilion. Not one pond of koi,
not one boy—I see him plain as day—
little canvas knapsack on his back,
riding his rickety bike to school,
pausing on the bridge to cover his ears
against the howl of air raid sirens.
I see him turn for home at the instant
the sun comes down to earth, flowering
like God knows what—a rose, a death rose
of heat and fire. No, no and no.
Not in Kyoto. Not in our Kyoto.
They’ll have to add another city to the list.
[Author’s note: Henry L. Stimson (1867-1950,) US Secretary of War, 1940-1945, was de facto head of the Manhattan Project. This poem is loosely based on an event from Stimson’s life.]
—Cover Paintings by Doris Harkness, Book and cover design by Lauren Grosskopf
My first day in Richard Hugo’s workshop, forty-some years ago, Hugo asked a second-year student to read his poem. “Robbie Loftus has beaten me up again in the boys can,” it began.
Wow, I thought, you can do that? I loved the voice. I loved that it named names, that I heard it talking to me. I loved the attitude behind the voice, the aplomb, the it is what it is quality when faced with the indignities of youth. I loved that by the first line it had me smiling. Thus, my introduction to Ed Harkness. Later that year, Hugo gushed over another Harkness poem (“The Man in the Recreation Room”); that it was formal, a villanelle, struck me as really odd. Only later did I understand how the mixing of these two impulses, the informal and the formal, gave his work its particular character.
One nugget of Hugo wisdom I still wholeheartedly endorse is that memorable writing has two subjects: the thing that snags your attention in the first place, and the thing you discover as you write—the true subject, the surprise, the thing you didn’t already know. The Law of the Unforeseen is a marvelous example of this dictum. As in his earlier collections [Saying the Necessary (2000), Beautiful Passing Lives (2010), and several chapbooks], these poems concern themselves, outwardly, with family life, and the natural world of the Pacific Northwest (he has a special affinity for birds). But they’re never static, they keep cranking things another crank.
Throughout The Law of the Unforeseen there’s an urgent sense of the poem as an act of revolt against the effects of time. There are elegies for departed friends, and a heartbreaking, regret-fueled account of a poetry student murdered by her boyfriend. Increasingly, the stories he wants to dig up and preserve are those of his own ancestors. In “Photo of the Twins, Ca. 1897,” we meet the Savoy girls, Mert and Gert, their girlhood portrait colliding with what’s known of their later history. The urge to know them (and be known by them) is potent: “I want to think my kinswomen . . . would smile,” he writes, “or at least have understood . . .
my life’s work, which has been to rouse them,
raise them from their graves, to light the flash
that saves them, and saves the unsmiling
radiant world, against all odds, from oblivion.
In “Ax,” Thomas Harkness, immigrant from County Antrim, fibs his way into the Union Army at age 55; three months later, a ricocheting ax blade slices through his shoe and four inches of bone and tendon. As with the twins, we flash ahead to glimpse his later life, and finally his broken grave marker; the poem ends:
The ax has gone to rust, just as his stone
will fall away to pieces, chunks, gravel, grit,
and at last to dust, its inscription
reduced to a whisper in the elms.
Another poem starts with a hand-made wooden spoon from a thrift store—burn-scarred, its wear suggesting years of stirring by a left-handed woman . . .
perhaps living—wild surmise—
in Iowa in the thirties, baby
balanced on her right hip . . .
The “wild surmise” fills another eight stanzas—his capacity for empathy and his powers of invention both have hair-triggers, we learn.
The Law of the Unforeseen has no villanelles, but there’s constant attention to sound and design, line and stanza pattern. Tellingly, “New Year’s Eve,” the most harrowing of poems (recounting an adult son’s fatal heart attack and “one chance in a million” resuscitation) uses a fixed form with key words repeated. And there are a number of sonnets, “Coffee” and “The Lesson,” to name two, both powerful, both reminding me that a rhymed couplet can hit like a mallet.
For all the grace and accessibility and humor (he can be savagely funny), Harkness also possesses a vein of rock-hard moral outrage. It surfaced throughout the earlier collections —in “Spain, 1938” (Saying the Necessary), for instance, and in the remarkable sequence, “Five Angry Little Songs” (Beautiful Passing Lives). He loathes war, duplicitous government, faux patriotism, stupidity, untruth, and all the rest of it. In another of the new sonnets (“America, Great Once Again”) we watch a ten-year-old girl witnessing her mother’s beating by police:
. . . men
in body armor, one boot on the woman’s back,.
one on her neck, while others tie her wrists,
twisting them till she shrieks, her body slack
from writhing against what it resists.
The devastating “The Unfocused Eyes of Drones” begins benignly enough:
They’re dream wrens in the clear lake of day,
like toys, a slightly larger replica
of those model planes men play with
at the park on weekend to escape the house.
However (calling to mind Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil”), it soon morphs into an account of a drone operator, somewhere in the American Heartland, dispassionately annihilating a target on the far side of the world—including the girl in red headscarf watering eggplants in the courtyard outside her home. Like you, perhaps, I’ve been profoundly demoralized by the 45th presidency; chilling as a poem like “The Unfocused Eyes of Drones” is, I find myself somehow bucked up, heartened by the sound of defiance; I’m reminded how critical it is for our artists to remain engaged.
Finally, The Law of the Unforeseen is a collection to celebrate, a book with range and heart, the product of intense curiosity and love of craft. If Hugo were still around he’d still be gushing.
by David Long
❖
THE LAW OF THE UNFORESEEN by Edward Harkness PUBLISHES this 9.15.18!
Join Ed and NW friends at upcoming readings:
Already past – Aug. 19, 2018: Oak Harbor Library, north end of Whidbey Island, 3-4:30 p.m.
Oct. 10, 2018: Jefferson County Library, Port Hadlock, south of Port Townsend, 7 p.m. I’ll be reading with Holly Hughes.
Oct. 11, 2018: Peninsula College, Port Angeles, 7 p.m. Reading with Holly Hughes.
Oct. 18, 2018: Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, 7 p.m. Reading with Alicia Hokanson.
Jan. 25, 2019: Pelican Bay Books, Anacortes, 7 p.m. Reading with Elizabeth Austin.
Apr. 12, 2019: Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Tacoma, 7 p.m. Reading with Alicia Hokanson.
Excerpt:
The Unfocused Eyes of Drones
They’re dream wrens in the clear lake of day,
like toys, a slightly larger replica
of those model planes men play with
at the park on weekends to escape the house.
One of them, Chuck, lives near me.
I see him summer afternoons, alone
on the baseball diamond’s pitcher’s mound.
He flies a delicate Sopwith Camel biplane,
then a screaming Spitfire that frightens a park dog.
He barrel-rolls his planes, gliding on some
unnamed emotion wired to his remote control.
You could say Chuck, the operator,
is well-rounded in his “Beer Beats Sex” tee shirt.
He’s got Santa’s beard and Trotsky’s glasses.
He wouldn’t harm a soul, though he lives
in a country that harms souls every day.
He may well know drones have been taught to think,
to beam down and detect human auras.
When its blue brain glows red, darts fly out,
quieter than starlight aimed at desert flowers.
The operator sits in a quiet room
playing the controls somewhere deep inside
the American Heartland—Ohio,
say, or Nebraska. He does not ask
who the girl in the red headscarf might be,
seen moving across his monitor
in what appears to be a courtyard filled
with trees, most likely lemon. She waters
a bed of eggplants with a plastic bottle
that could in his mind be a bomb
she plans to plant by the nearby roadside.
Crickets fill the air with their raspy chorus.
The operator can’t hear them, nor does he
know her scarf is red. He sees only
the flash of light on his screen, sees
an opened rose made of pieces of the girl’s house:
brick, rock, glass, iron, paper, threads
from her headscarf, seen on the screen
in various tones of gray and sepia,
a roiling miasma seeping outward
from the courtyard. When the last
chunk of mortar has fallen, the last
of the seared leaves flutters down,
the mist of lemons hovers in the air.
“There’s a fearlessness in the poems of Anne Pitkin’s But Still, Music. The poems span childhood, adulthood and everything in between: growing up in the Jim Crow south, marriage, divorce, the lifelong sorrow over a daughter’s passing, travel to distant lands, and the quiet glory of the natural world. Nothing is off limits, and that’s part of the bravery of this collection. Pitkin’s poems are both emotionally charged and restrained, the notes exact as a just-tuned piano. There’s evidence of musicality throughout, as in this sonorous line, “Cicadas sawed gritty fiddles,” from a poem called “Ghost Stories.” Pitkin’s book is full of such surprises, including occasional moments of mordant humor and deeply earned revelations. Pitkin’s book is just the sort of music we need, now more than ever.” —Ed Harkness, The Law of the Unforeseen & Beautiful Passing Lives
Full of warnings, arguments, and reckonings, Anne Pitkin’s But, Still Music attempts to move beyond a mindset “pretend[ing] all is well,” whether in home, community, nation, or world. Instead, she takes us, like an adventurer, into the various landscapes of “this blessed chaos” where we find no Keatsian nightingale, only a mockingbird “arguing in many voices.” “It’s a long story,” she admits, how we eventually come to understand the past; how, in time, we see through perspectives not our own; and how we find mercy, acceptance, perhaps even redemption, as we move farther and more truthfully “into our broken-open world.” —Jeff Hardin, Watermark and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being
Anne Pitkin’s new book But Still, Music is a lyrical, moving symphony to loss, betrayal, illness, and all the myriad and sundry accidentals of this life on earth. Pitkin moves the reader with her adept and polished verses. She takes us from a southern childhood and on through adolescence, into motherhood, and beyond, into the northern latitudes. While all the seasons of earth and life are treated magnanimously in Pitkin’s collection, winter holds an especial fascination. For this reader, certain hallmark lines will never be forgotten. They speak, as do many other pure moments of witness, to the beauty of the ordinary transformed into the holy: “…alders reached into the early evening sky…/Reached above the traffic, the walkers, the lit shops, into the no-nonsense emptiness/ “where beauty offers no meaning, breaks no vows.” (“The Bare Trees,” 50) But Still, Music is a must read. —Judith Skillman, House of Burnt Offerings
ANNE PITKIN grew up in the South, Clarksville, TN, when it was still a small town. She attended Vanderbilt University when the Civil Rights Movement was getting underway. She graduated just after Bloody Sunday, the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Some of the poems in this collection are about growing up as a privileged white child in the segregated South. Anne moved to Bellingham, WA when she married and subsequently to Seattle, where she has lived ever since. She has two grown children and two grandchildren. Their mother, her eldest, died three years ago. Many of the poems here address that loss. Anne is a retired community college English instructor. She went back to school and became a psychotherapist, sometimes practicing while still teaching. She is retired from both now. She plays jazz piano with her friends, pandemic permitting. She currently lives with her two dogs, Riley, an oversized Pomeranian and Klaus, a mini dachshund. This is her third full length collection, preceded by YELLOW and WINTER ARGUMENTS, and a chapbook NOTES FOR CONTINUING THE PERFORMANCE. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Chicago, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, One, New Orleans Review, New England Review, Rattle and many others.
In Russell Hill’s The Egret, a grieving father wreaks vengeance on the hit-and-run driver who caused his daughter to die. This father, never named in the book, begins stalking the uber-rich and conscienceless Earl Anthony Winslow. As the tension escalates, so do the attempts on Winslow’s life, moving up from a gunshot to a poisonous snake bite to a Molotov cocktail and even to a hastily assembled IED. Although the book is deadly serious, this escalation of violence is faintly reminiscent of Wile E Coyote’s constant attempts to kill the Road Runner. Winslow somehow survives everything the grieving father throws at him, although several bystanders aren’t as fortunate. The father sees himself as an egret: patient, and deadly. Finally confronting his daughter’s killer, he says, “There’s a bird that is a stalker. It moves silently and when it finds the thing it wants to eat, it remains motionless until the thing is right where it wants it and then it strikes. Right now I have you right where l want you.” It isn’t the final act of revenge itself that makes this 161 page novella so fascinating, it’s the look deep inside the mind and soul of a man who compares himself to a bird. Author Russell Hill likes birds. He is best known for the magical realism of The Lord God Bird, in which two teens taking refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp encounter a bird long thought to be extinct. In that book, Hill visualized the ivory-billed woodpecker as ecology’s bellwether: learn or die. In this deftly handled novel, an egret delivers a lesson on how to kill. – Betty Webb, Mystery Scene Magazine
From others:
I was so engrossed by The Egret that I read it in one straight sitting. It’s brilliant, concise, poetic, gritty and deceptively simple with all the dark undercurrents of anger and nostalgia. – Max Jourdan, London filmmaker
In his novella, The Egret, science fiction writer turns to realistic—all too realistic—fiction. In this suspense tale, Hill writes in a lean, mean prose style that I associate with some of my favorite writers, including those household names of fame, Chandler and Hemingway….I also admire Hill’s use of a daring device–1st person POV, where it becomes ominously more and more clear the narrator, who has suffered what he believes is a terrible injustice, may not survive his obsession with revenge, that his elaborate plans to get even may end in ways he did not foresee. – Edward Harkness, The Law of the Unforeseen, Beautiful Passing Lives & Saying the Necessary
We would love to hear your thoughts! If you read The Egret, or any PBS books, please add a comment – it doesn’t have to be fancy or time consuming – on Amazon, Pleasureboatstudio.com or Goodreads. Thank you so much. Cheers to igniting indie buzz!
The Law of the Unforeseen
Poetry by Edward Harkness
Edward Harkness writes about family, history, family history, the natural world-its beauty, its degradation-the strange miracle of consciousness. Nothing is off the table. In fact, everything is on the table, including the kitchen sink. |
$15 through October 15th
Order directly by clicking this link:
PleasureBoatStudio.com
Join Ed and NW friends at upcoming readings:
Oct. 10, 2018: Jefferson County Library, Port Hadlock, south of Port Townsend, 7 p.m. I’ll be reading with Holly Hughes.
Oct. 11, 2018: Peninsula College, Port Angeles, 7 p.m. Reading with Holly Hughes.
Oct. 18, 2018: Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, 7 p.m. Reading with Alicia Hokanson.
Jan. 25, 2019: Pelican Bay Books, Anacortes, 7 p.m. Reading with Elizabeth Austin.
Apr. 12, 2019: Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Tacoma, 7 p.m. Reading with Alicia Hokanson.
Happy reading this cozy fall, and if you can, please write a few words on Amazon or Goodreads to help build steam for more readers. Thank you for supporting this small literary press and its authors!
Pleasure Boat Studio is very grateful for your help. Check out the Kickstarter Fundraising Campaign to contribute to the publishing costs of the next four Pleasure Boat releases. For every $50 pledged, receive a ‘New Release’ or a book of your choice from Pleasure Boat Studio! Be a part of the success and future of this Independent Press. Thank you so much!
The next four Pleasure Boat releases:
Twilight in Danzig by Siegfried Kra: Historical fiction. A captivating story based on Kra’s own life, from his eyes as a child of a wealthy industrialist family, living through the rise of Hitler in the 30’s, to their eventual escape from their beloved home in Danzig, Germany.
The Law of the Unforeseen by Edward Harkness: Poetry. The personal as universal, from thrift store spoon to a mother’s loss, Harkness explores a variety of subjects with a keen eye and insightful expression. Ed is a widely published NW poet.
The Egret by Russell Hill: Mystery/Thriller. This is a stark, straight forward story of revenge at any cost. One man’s obsession to avenge the death of his daughter by tracking down the hit and run driver that sent her to the bottom of the ocean. Hill is a three time Poe Nominee.
Goodbye to Tenth Street by Irving Sandler: Fiction/Historical fiction. Sandler has been a NY art critic since the ‘50s. The stage is 1956-1962, the abstract expressionist movement to the beginning of Pop art. This is a back biting, cut throat art world set in galleries, the Club, The Cedar Tavern, between the sheets, between the agonizing artists, successful artists, dealers, curators, critics… It’s a crisp and intriguing look into America’s art history.
Poetry. The poems in this volume focus on life’s essentials: childhood, the rhythms of family, love for those who are dearest. These themes stand in opposition, often within the same poem, to the darker edges of growing up, the quirks and burdens of history, and the violence of our times, whose horrors are nearer than we want to believe. Other recurring motifs include the ephemeral nature of time and memory, and the inevitability of loss. Poetry, for Edward Harkness, acts as a counterforce against these natural tendencies, against oblivion.
“Seeing Ed Harkness’ name on the contents page of a little magazine brings the same confidence that the name of a solid old character actor in a film’s opening credits brings: no matter how bad the stars might be, the film won’t be a total loss. For years Harkness has gone about the business of opening the heart with skill, and for years poets in the know have welcomed each of his chapbooks, each poem or suite of poems in a magazine, with a consistent and familiar pleasure.” -Sam Green, poet and publisher of Brooding Heron Press
Other books by Edward Harkness at Pleasure Boat Studio: Beautiful Passing Lives, The Law of the Unforeseen
To his everlasting regret, Edward Harkness did not see Elvis when the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll visited Seattle during the World’s Fair in 1962. Other than that, Harkness is a happy husband to Linda, father to Ned and Devin, and grandfather to Clio and Hilde. Having retired after a 30+ year career as a writing teacher at Shoreline Community College, he now devotes his time to other pleasures: gardening, cycling, visiting the kids and, now and then, making poems. He is the author of two other full-length poetry collections, Saying the Necessary and Beautiful Passing Lives, both from Pleasure Boat Studio. His most recent chapbook, Ice Children, was published by Split Lip Press in 2014. Two poems in this collection, “Tying a Tie” and “Airborne,” won the Terrain.org annual poetry prize for 2017. He lives in Shoreline, Washington, about a mile from the north Seattle home where he grew up, and where his mother, Doris Harkness, whose art works grace the covers of this book, still lives. http://harkness01.wixsite.com/harkness
INTERVIEW WITH SPLIT LIP PRESS MAGAZINE ‘He is the man, myth and legend, folks––Ed Harkness, runner-up of the Split Lip Press 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Awards’ Article on poetry process, open minded reflections on what makes a poet a poet, the development as a youth to love of sound and language, and what a beginning poet can do to grow as a poet.
Its title echoing a line in the Mountain poems of Stonehouse (Shih-wu), Perishable World leads us through the cycle of seasons, interwoven with memory and reflections on the transitory nature of life, following the death of the poet’s husband. Her cycle of grief begins in a literal and psychic late winter, in constant Pacific Northwest rain, as maple seeds “try to grow trees out of the muck” of gutters of the old house (“the house he built for you”) sinking into its surrounding garden, and the poet watches “the light itself imagining / a June of staggering blossoms” (“In February”). We first glimpse the beloved standing by the house he has built, and in accumulating resonance, images of this house and the beloved’s work of building it become the ongoing trope, the image of the couple’s life together: “Under this roof / we hold each other’s histories” (“Blueprint”). In “Lament” as he is dying, she asks her beloved, but really herself, “Did I give you what you needed / in the end?” Struggles with grieving and release across the seasons rise in the end to a litany, “Bequeath,” as the poet lets go and gives over to the departed all that the couple shared. She emerges “In the Clearing” where the house stands, to the final acceptance of this life and death, and of the space in which she still lies down. “Love built this house,” poet Alicia Hokanson declares, in an intimation of mortality that suggests she may indeed have “learned to see through this perishable world.” —Carolyne Wright, author of This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems, and lead editor of Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace
A native of Seattle, Alicia Hokanson grew up exploring the beaches, forests, and islands of Puget Sound, inspiring her deep attention to the natural world. Her first book, Mapping the Distance, was selected by Carolyn Kizer for the King County Arts Commission publication prize and it was released by Breitenbush Books in 1989. Brooding Heron Press published two chapbooks, Phosphorous and Insistent in the Skin. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Upon completing her B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Washington, Alicia pursued a career teaching English in a variety of venues, from working with high-school students in South Australia to teaching grades 1-8 in a one-room schoolhouse on Waldron Island, 8th graders on Bainbridge Island, and middle-school English for 27 years at Lakeside School in Seattle. Named River of Words Poetry Teacher of the year in 2003 for her work nurturing young writers, she also held the Bleakney Chair in English at Lakeside upon her retirement in 2014. She now devotes her time to writing, reading, and advocating for social and environmental justice.
Insistent in the Skin (Brooding Heron Press, 1993), Mapping the Distance (Breitenbush Books, 1989), Phosphorous (Brooding Heron Press, 1984); Journals: Crab Creek Review, Exhibition, Poetry USA, Pontoon, Raven Chronicles; Performance: Metro Poetry Bus (2005)
More Praise:
In a quiet, insistent way Perishable World’s poems of loss are also a heartening celebration of what endures, what grows, what appears right before us: forests, mountains, cliffs above an island beach, “kingfisher’s branch and eagle’s snag.” Though these poems grieve for and honor lives that have passed away forever, they sing too of what remains. What remains, Hokanson tells us in language rich with image and musical phrasing, is precious beyond measure. Never have we needed such a reminder as these moving poems offer more than now. -Ed Harkness, author of Law of the Unforeseen and others
In Alicia Hokanson’s poems, the intimacy of love merges with the intimacy of living closely with the landscape of the Pacific Northwest-the deep green of temperate rainforest, the islands and mountains, the flowers and bushes whose names become poetry. Her landscape includes the sorrows of this country over the last several years for the fragility of our environment, the spreading injustice, “half the nation whipsawed in grief.” Love in these poems is a giving: caring for a musician uncle “who said/I don’t recommend living past 100,” and remembering her parents’ strengths followed by their loss through age and illness. Most striking are the poems about the illness and death of her husband. They are poems of love more than grief because loss is inevitable. Rather than rage against it, Hokanson attaches it to her world and makes it sing “to find again/the center where I love you.” -Sherry Rind, author of Between States of Matter
Alicia Hokanson’s Perishable World is a book of mourning—for the earth, for her parents, for her recently deceased husband. And yet, it is also a rich celebration of all it mourns: most notably the landscape of her island cabin, “Love built this house,” on land and a garden with its creatures lovingly detailed—In these broken days—half the nation whipsawed in grief. . . the sum of autumn’s rubric/ is light and color. . . late bees in the penstemon/ still gathering pollen for the hive. In the stunningly moving poems written after his death, her late husband comes alive: the tattered chair/ in front of the computer/where you invited every virus/ with your reckless searching. And in the exquisite poem “Ritual”: this shore where you would /each night exclaim,/ “we are so lucky” as we, her readers are so lucky to have this fine, overdue collection of an accomplished poet. -Anne Pitkin, author of Winter Arguments and others
Left on the Porch
polished curve of oyster shell
hidden whorl of whelk
white-striped rocks for wishing on
grey feather abandoned by a gull
flat black shale that fits the thumb
for skipping far
brittle dollars incised with stars
pink cockles and bleached crab claws
summer’s piled treasure
gathered from beach walks
emptied from the children’s pockets
all these talismans
rimmed now with blown in leaves
fir needles and dust
swept into the bucket for dispersal
down the forest path to the shore
strewn along the tideline
tossed to wave and rip
pummeled in the winter wash
lost in the seasons’ wild shuffle
Beauty Resists
So unexpected to come upon it
as we followed the swerving
waxwings, their commotion
in the air our umbrellas curtained:
the gold Gingko
—double trunk rising
from its yellow leavings—
paving the sidewalk
with real luster,
cement softer under the mash
of ochre leaves along the gutters.
Shine of rain over everything.
In the park, vine maples hold on
to some crimson tatters
above the banks where the last salmon
fight their way home
in the stream bed
the neighbors made good again.
In these broken days—
half the nation whipsawed in grief
at what we will become—
the sum of autumn’s rubric
is light and color in the trees,
flash of silver fins in the creek,
and late bees in the penstemon
still gathering pollen for the hive.
Lament
The August beach is as you left it:
hung with absconding shadows
across the afternoon
the sun moving south
over horizon islands
yellow jackets busy in the sand
mining the detritus
in the line of seaweed the tide left.
No agates or feathers call to me today,
as they did to you always,
just the rattle of colored stones—
the greens and greys, whites and golds
shifting under my sandals
and the piercing squawks of seagulls
over a herring ball in the bay.
Out of summer’s perfect
and lonely afternoon,
a moment returns to me from long ago.
Taking your hand as we moved
in a festival crowd
I let fall away
every contentious word
every argument, letting go
purely into the love you offered—
Did I give you what you needed
in the end?