Friends, You Drank Some Darkness

Joanne Harris Allred takes her title from a line by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, the Nobel Laureate known for his precise and enigmatic imagery. Her poems also rely on precise imagery and description, and though less enigmatic, they can be deeply profound. The poem she borrows from is called "Elegy," which seems appropriate since this collection contains a number of informal elegies for parents, friends, siblings, pets, and even her younger selves. Her theme is revealed in the first poem, "Small Gifts," which ends:

Yes, I know matter is transient, only on loan for a spell.

Wordsworth said we find strength in what remains, the shell

of memory, a philosophic mind. And nature picks up the slack,

fills any vacuum: an ocean of things taken, small gifts given back.

In a life of steady losses, how do we find-how do we recognize-the sustaining gifts that the world can provide for us? These twentyfour poems are her attempt to answer this question that haunts the introspective soul. For me, they gleam with bursts of joy in the darkness we drink daily.

-Gary Thompson, author of Broken by Water: Salish Sea Years

In Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, Joanne Harris Allred writes poems that are both earthbound and mystical, exploring the "dueling imperatives" of our lives where we "attend to/the fleshy, material instant" while trying "to stay alert for...a glimpse of what's beyond." In these pages, there is the whole freight of a fully lived life, a season of her twenties when she "stripped to raw abandon" and "only the wild moment mattered." A winter, when she "was a leaf caught / in an eddy" and "even now...can't name what emerged." We go on journeys with friends and family, we discover places of great beauty where "the soul converses only in radiance." We descend into "death's grotto" to "hear/the drip of a spring hidden deeper, / like the plink of piano keys..." and time is an "impeccably dressed heartless killer." This book brings gifts of sound, wisdom, and humor. This is a book to savor.

-Susan Browne, author of Monster Mash