Saying the Necessary
BY JUDY LIGHTFOOT (reviewed in Seattle Weekly July
20-28, 2000)
ED HARKNESS GREW UP in Seattle and studied poetry with
Northwest writers Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. His
poems evoke a familiar territory--from the Umatilla River to Aurora
Avenue, from Yakima to the San Juans--filled with friends, travel,
and colloquies with family and memory. The title of this book
from a small, fine Bainbridge Island publisher reflects the tone
and pace of its contents--easygoing meditation opening into
insights that crackle and sting.
Saying the Necessary
poems by Edward Harkness (Pleasure Boat Studio, $14)
Harkness is most interesting when puzzling over the thinness of
the wall between peaceful domesticity and massive political
bloodshed. "History always comes home," he says, and war
invites itself right into his book. He recalls the bayonets hung
above the mantel with its "Christmas cards, candles . . . and two
ceramic squirrels" at Grandma's house: "That's the blood gutter,
this gray-eyed/lover of dahlias explained."
Indeed, women are equal players in the century's conflicts, like
the fighter Hannah, who "tripped on a German mine and became
a rose/opening forever in her father's palm" and the Spanish
women herded against a wall, who laughed and lifted their
dresses in defiance of the firing squad.
A few of the poems veer into sentimentality or flatness, but
usually they're fresh and satisfying. The author can be funny,
too, as when he opens his rain-soaked journal and finds that "the
only legible word/is rapture./It might be/rupture."
Occasionally birds trill in this collection, but there's little music in
its voice. Nor is there much of music's counterpart in poetry--the
palpable tension that comes from speech pushing at the
envelope of form. Harkness works with a trowel instead of a
blade or brush. It's a good trowel. His materials are mostly gray
and rough, such as the Great Wall of China that snakes its
granite way through the book. Along uneven ground the poet has
mortared a line of ordinary stones, then another line upon that
one, and then another. The lines may not sing, but they're solid,
and they stand.