Poetry. Edward Harkness writes about family, history, family history, the natural world--its beauty, its degradation--the strange miracle of consciousness. Nothing is off the table. In fact, everything is on the table, including the kitchen sink. They move from the personal to the universal, to the quickened heart of shared emotion. "In THE LAW OF THE UNFORESEEN, the law Harkness speaks of requires us to know now and then. We walk under 'the trees of unremembrance, ' so that we may know who we are, how we got here, and who we came from. And we arrive in this lovely and threatened paradise called Earth, right now. The 'endless replication of clam shells, ants, / hyacinths in spring'?--it's true, we will lose those things, individually, but these poems savor such stuff, and in that savoring they give us hope for the future."--Robert Wrigley "Ed Harkness's great gift is for the lyric telling of 'the heart's winding chronicle.' Permeated with the keenly felt ache of life, 'the world breaking your heart and, somehow, mending it, ' these poems celebrate the sensuous beauty of 'this gold world' in deep music line by line. Harkness's poems are a necessary sustenance for our present perilous moment."--Alicia Hokanson "THE LAW OF THE UNFORESEEN is a collection to celebrate, a book with range and heart, the product of intense curiosity and love of craft. If Hugo were still around he'd still be gushing."--David Long