136 What Island Review by UNAISI NABOBO-BABA P.K. Harmon. (2011). Copenhagen and Florham Park, NJ: Serving House Books. 81pp, 3 parts, $15.00 (Paperback). ISBN: 978-0-9838289-3-8. This timely collection is bursting at the spine so to speak with ideas, feelings, nuances and commentaries on a number of issues of island life - sustainable environments, sea level rise, economic hardships, degradation of nature and the seemingly everyday pastimes that may border at times on the mundane. The poet, P.K. Harmon, speaks with a personal and political voice. He is in awe of nature’s beauty and protective of it, embracing it and at times questioning it. He addresses us with deep concerns about the earth, at times castigating us for the misuse of it. In the context of the Marshall Islands; with its domination history, especially with the massacre on Bikini by the U.S. and all its associated pains on islanders, P.K. Harmon reminds us that we live on an island – Marshall Islands or Earth – and the island is finite. There are 47 poems altogether presented in three parts. The book moves from one being marooned on an island in the South Seas with its romanticized images of beautiful blue skies, sun, sand and clear diving waters, to the subtle commentary and socio-political critique on the need for safeguarding the environment, impacts of modernity and colonization. P.K. Harmon explores many facets of island life via themes of ethnicity, cultural survival, political inequality and political dependence. The Marshall Islands are heavily dependent on aid and compact money from the United States and he alludes to this in more than one way via imagery and metaphors. Moreover, he examines these subjects in a manner that leads to psychological and moral insights pertinent not only to the clash of Anglo-American and Marshallese culture (Pacific cultures), but also to the universal human condition. For instance, “What Foot” (p. 45) ends with the awkward realization that man leaves his mark, his “footprints,” and inevitably alters or defaces the beauty that is earth. He is celebratory in his accolade of the beauty of nature: and I get way out there on the water in the sky / feeling pretty beautiful actually but then look down / to my foot and the print it inevitably has to make. (Stanza 3, last line). He is an environmental word-activist immersed in the island world and nature. He is constantly pondering over some element or dimension of nature; he is in a relationship with nature and at times lost in it. This strong ecological imperative is a recurring theme throughout the book’s three parts and is perhaps the strongest message in his work. This aspect of P.K. Harmon’s poetry resonates well with Harvard University entomologist, Edward O. Wilson,