Creek Water: New & Seleceted Poems
Edward Harkness
$20.00 Available September 12, 2025 ISBN 979-8-9917400-4-3
In Creek Water: New & Selected Poems, Ed Harkness’s ever-attentive eye is in full evidence. These poems shimmer like stones in flowing water as he holds discrete moments up to the light, turning them over, letting them go. Quietly and artfully, they explore parallels between the personal and the historic, setting ordinary details of daily life alongside well and less well-known world events, ranging from the Civil War to the hanging of poet Benjamin Moloise in Pretoria. Whether writing about the joys of a long marriage, fatherhood or grandfatherhood, or the challenge of facing his own mortality, Harkness reminds that history and our lives are made of moments that—when witnessed deeply, generously and compassionately—can transform us. While written over several decades, as a collection, these poems still speak to our current times, to “the world breaking your heart and somehow mending it.”
“Harkness’s range of form and subjects is so rich, you can open this volume anywhere to find moments of revelation. ‘One moment, / you’re listing all your failings. / The next, you’re standing with your lover / on a river gravel bar, / showered in a confetti of light.’ More than anything, Harkness’s lyric, muscular language does the necessary work of reconnecting us to the natural world. —Alicia Hokanson, author of Perishable World, Winner of the International Eyelands Book Awards Grand Prize for poetry.