The law of the unforeseen : poems

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. The Law of the Unforeseen is about family, history, family history, the natural worldits beauty, its degradationthe strange miracle of consciousness. I write about the blues, failure, great apes, time passing, icebergs, massage therapy, the Civil War, crows, bats, potatoes, spoons and drones. Nothing is off the table. In fact, everything is on the table, including the fabled kitchen sink. The poet Galway Kinnell once said that when writing a poem, the deeper you go inside yourself, and the more intimate you become in the process of composing and engaging language with your whole being, a strange thing happens. The poem, Kinnell said, becomes both personal and universal. By diving deep, the poem discoversor uncoverswhat binds us, what we all the quickened heart of recognition and shared emotions. Thats what Ive aimed for in The Law of the to plumb deep, to find the best words in their best order, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said in his famous distinction between prose (words in the best order.) and poetry the best words in the best order). "The Law of the Unforeseen is about family, history, family history, the natural world--its beauty, its degradation--the strange miracle of consciousness. I write about the blues, failure, great apes, time passing, icebergs, massage therapy, the Civil War, crows, bats, potatoes, spoons and drones. Nothing is off the table. In fact, everything is on the table, including the fabled kitchen sink."--Amazon.com