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.