Beautiful Passing Lives. This item is unavailable.Beautiful Passing Lives

In Beautiful Passing Lives, Edward Harkness writes poems of disappearance and transformation, loss and recovery. In "After the Flood," a river's rampage erases not only a landscape but the memory of the landscape; in "Unfinished Cabin on the Rattlesnake," a "dreamer's" roofless cabin stays unfinished for decades and becomes a different kind of home; in the title poem, "Beautiful Passing Lives," the glow from a distant passenger liner at night vanishes, then returns "as comets do, reminding us / of something out there / that may never strike land, / but glitter still, and glide / offshore on nothing." In Harkness's field of vision, the inevitability of loss is not the final word. Rather, the buried artifacts rise again to the light, as in "Against Optimism," when the speaker discovers a child's marble buried in the garden, "its green iris, / luminous after all these years / underground." In language that is evocative, haunting and unforgettable, Harkness rescues fragments of our collective life and puts them on display.

Ed Harkness grew up in Seattle and still lives not far from his childhood home. He is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including most recently Syringa in Twilight (Red Wing Press, 2010). Saying the Necessary, his first full-length collection, was published by Pleasure Boat Studio in 2000. His poems can be found in print journals including Fine Madness, Great River Review, The Humanist, Midwest Quarterly, Seattle Review and others. His work has also appeared in several pioneering online literary journals, including Mudlark, Switched-on Gutenberg, and Salt River Review. Harkness lives with his wife, Linda, in Shoreline, WA, where he teaches writing at Shoreline Community College. He's the proud father of two grown sons, Devin and Ned.