Beautiful Passing Lives

Poetry. Ed Harkness is very good at shining the poet's light on natural details and puts this to good use in poems that go outside his more familiar environs, such as looking at the English Channel: "The Channel looks benign,/a road of hammered silver. Unglamorous,/windswept, this beach is no Riviera./Here you feel the slap of the beyond." And, looking even farther: "the Dog Star, lifting its drowsy head,//guarding the dog house of heaven/with its one yellow eye." Harkness extends his range when addressing social issues: "but the horde of you—the majority—/have gone remote control,/ignorant of our sacrifices..." Ed Harkness does not squint when he looks at the world and we are rewarded with a full and multi-leveled world in these poems.