The Safety of Edges

The Safety of Edges ponders liminal times and spaces tracing the borders between now and then here and there childhood and the grown poet. The edge of anything is both a limit and a possibility an encounter either safe or risky. Pruiksmas poems seek what it is one awakens to in the half light between darkness and dawn an emptiness that is not empty a saying in the silence a song we cant see or whatever in movement might remain still. Pondering a world waiting to be whole they return repeatedly to home. Theirs is a quiet voice of the hints that the past like the things that inhabit it emanates of evanescences of questioning and questing of the mystery of ordinary moments: playing cards drawing opening a door building sheds seeing neighbors. Not only doors or walls not only voices all things leave traces.  There is nothing to dull the emptying darkness beyond even the darkness I could see Pruiksma writes in a poem that appears early in his book.  Yet he finds near the end of it a darkness not dark an emptiness not empty. The Safety of Edges is a work of a compassionate discreteness a generous simplicity in which the hours of life are not lost but found sometimes all of it here in our hands.Peter Weltner author of The Light of the Sun Become Sea and Unbecoming Time